Messing With Time
by Nim-the-Lesser
Summary: Harry James Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Defeater of Voldemort, Chief Auror, Master of Death, finds that he is five years old. It should not surprise anyone that things in Magical Britain immediately become rather strange.
1. What The Fuck

_It was six o'clock in the godforsaken morning, thought Harry Potter, as he trudged wearily through the front door of his little house in Godric's Hollow. At least he didn't have to deal with people trying to talk to him; Hermione had put such powerful protective charms on his house that even people who had license to visit and could see the building if they stood near it usually couldn't actually remember where he lived. But seriously, it was way too late. Ron was still in the office yelling at people, because when the Chief Auror and his Deputy got into a fight like that with no warning whatsoever it meant that someone somewhere had royally fucked up, but someone had hit Harry with some kind of exhaustion hex, and he wanted to be asleep eight hours ago. He didn't even bother turning on any lights, just stumbled groggily into the bedroom, tripped over Arnold the Pygmy Puff, and swore slightly too loudly._

_Ginny jumped as if electrocuted, and three seconds later Harry was flat on his back on the floor with her foot on his ribcage and her wand at his throat, feeling suddenly much more awake._

_He held very, very still. "Ginny. It's me. It's Harry. The war's over. You won. It's okay."_

_Sometimes people at Quidditch games gave him these ridiculously hateful looks, like getting the Harpies' star Chaser to marry him by being Harry Potter was somehow cheating. As if they thought if only they were rich and famous enough, they could get famous successful Ginny Weasley to cook them dinner and be their decorative social event date, or whatever it was they expected. The vast majority of people, Harry found, did not even consider the fact that famous successful Ginny Weasley had been possessed by Voldemort when she was eleven, had co-led a violent resistance movement when she was barely sixteen, that she had spent her sixth year of school being assaulted at random moments and fighting for her life against, in some cases, her adult professors. There was a darkness in her, a sharp poisonous bite of vengefulness that didn't quite go away with the end of the war. She slept with her wand and had a faster draw time from a cold start than most Aurors. She flinched at sudden noises and cried in her sleep._

_She sat awake with him when he had nightmares, too, and sang him gentle lullabyes. She tutted at him about the state of his poor broomstick which had seen entirely too many firefights, and fixed it for him when he wasn't looking. Ginny was terrifying and a little broken, but so was he, and he loved her like nothing else in the world. He cooked for her, usually, and the way she smiled - sudden and bright, like fire catching - was one of his favorite things in life, somewhere up there with unassisted flight. Still. He suspected the strangers who gave him hateful looks when she jumped into his arms straight off her broomstick did not actually realize how frightening Ginny was if you woke her up unexpectedly. _

_Harry didn't move. Ginny was shaking all over, but her wand hand was very steady. "I love you," he added, in the same even, soothing voice. It was still mostly dark and she couldn't actually see him very well, he knew, but the look on his face right now was probably unbearably sappy anyway. Sometimes Ron made affectionate fun of him for it, because he wasn't actually doing it on purpose, but generally only after it had sufficiently done its job of convincing Ginny that he was, in fact, Harry and he did, in fact, love her and he was not, in fact, going to try to murder her in her sleep. "I love you and you're safe and please breathe, okay?"_

_Seven AM found him lying in bed petting Ginny's hair, and no one had been injured and everything was okay. It was fine, he'd skip work tomorrow, Ron had things under control, Ron was great like that. Right now he had important things to do. He drifted off to sleep to the sound of Ginny murmuring, "Love you."_

* * *

><p>Harry Potter woke up.<p>

He felt immediately wrong.

For one thing, he was cold. He'd gone to sleep warm, under a thick down quilt and with his wife wrapped up in his arms. He was now lying under a thin, threadbare wool-ish blanket, and he was very alone.

For another thing, he felt claustrophobic. His bedroom was an wide, airy space, with big windows and a high ceiling. He was now, he was pretty sure, in a very small, dark, confined space.

For yet another thing, he felt ... tiny?

"_Lumos_," he said, out of sheer habit, and nothing happened. Usually that worked if he was within arm's reach of his wand.

Well, shit.

Quick physical examination yielded the information that he was not injured in any meaningful way - all his bones were where they belonged and he didn't appear to be bleeding anywhere - but he didn't have his glasses and also he was perfectly clean-shaven. And he was much, much skinnier than he should be.

Shit.

He felt around him a little bit, and found that there was a small shelf, a very small pile of probably clothes, a string for a light, and a wall within arm's reach in both directions. He turned on the light and found that he was somewhere alarmingly familiar, and wearing too-large clothes that he knew had once belonged to his cousin Dudley, when Dudley was ... probably three or four. He was less blind than he should be, for not having his glasses, which probably meant he was Polyjuiced as someone who wasn't blind. But he didn't feel like he was under Polyjuice, the feeling was distinctive once you'd done it enough times, your skin sort of itched faintly and magic was a little bit more difficult. When had he gotten glasses? When he was six or seven? Right now he was in a body that looked like it was ... five, maybe.

_Shit._

"If this is some kind of prank, I am going to set someone on fire," said Harry aloud. The Weasleys didn't do pranks anymore, as a general family agreement, and anyway none of them would have been this cruel. Anyone who decided to kidnap Harry, force him into the body of a small child, and throw him into a convincing facsimile of the cupboard under the stairs at 4 Privet Drive, was almost definitely doing it on purpose to hurt him. Although who thought that could possibly be a good idea was still a mystery to him. Nothing happened in response to the words, so he sighed and cast about him for further clues. Nothing looked strange, here. Small pile of hand-me-down clothes. A couple of small broken toys Dudley hadn't wanted, which looked vaguely familiar in a haven't-seen-them-in-two-decades kind of way. Flickering single light bulb. Miscellaneous spiders, joy. No signs of magic, obvious or otherwise.

The door was locked from the outside, naturally.

Well. He wasn't going to just sit here and wonder what the hell was going on. _Guess I'll do the obvious thing_.

He was five years old, apparently, but he was a magical five-year-old, because that would be true even if they'd Polyjuiced him into a Muggle kid.

Magical children could, under stress, eat the kind of damage that would outright kill Muggle adults.

_Heeeere goes nothing - _

There was a loud crunching sound, as his elbow went through the wooden door like it was tissue paper. Faintly, he heard someone shriek. He reached through the hole he'd just made, unlatched the door, and stepped out of it, carefully, looking around him.

He did, actually, appear to be in the front hall of the Dursleys' old house. There were pictures on the wall of Dudley - ages one through five - just like there ought to be, and this looked plausibly like he thought it probably had in, what year was he five years old, nineteen eighty-six? Yeah. Wow, there was even an old rotary telephone, he thought in amusement. Someone was trying really hard for this charade. There was the dated-looking television and the carefully vaccuumed floor and the couch, and -

"What the ruddy hell do you think you're doing, boy?"

- and there, apparently, was Vernon Dursley, storming down the stairs and looking enraged and not at all like he was fifty-ish years old. Harry honestly did not know how old his uncle was supposed to be. He knew Dudley was his age, and Vernon had probably been at least twenty when he married Petunia, so he was probably somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five. But this guy looked maaaaaybe thirty? And still was clearly, visibly, Vernon Dursley. Had someone broken into the Dursleys' house, stolen Vernon's hair to Polyjuice into him, and then taken De-Aging Potion, just to look convincingly like the version of Harry's Muggle uncle who'd existed twenty years ago? Harry basically understood the cruel intent of causing him to wake up locked in a cupboard, the idea was probably for him to panic from PTSD, but this seemed a little bit like too much effort for too little gain. Whoever it was had managed to kidnap him right out from under a very stressed Ginny's nose; that that point they might as well just kill him if they hated him this much.

"Um, this is a really strange prank," said Harry. Maybe they'd tried to kill him, freaked out, and invented a bizarre fictional setup to try to cover their tracks? A lot of people still didn't realize that he was immune to the Killing Curse, funnily enough. He usually ducked that one out of habit anyway, and it wasn't like he went about publicizing the fact that being Master of Death had apparently made him permanently immune; _he_ hadn't even known about it for five years after the Battle of Hogwarts, and most people who found out got arrested in fairly short order. For, well, trying to murder the Chief Auror. So it wasn't common knowledge, and people tended to panic when they encountered it ... that really didn't adequately explain this, though.

Also, fake-Vernon was now yelling at him. Harry tuned in. " - feed you, clothe you, and this is how you choose to repay us, you little freak of nature - "

Well, that was familiar. "Are you an actor or did someone force-feed you Polyjuice and an Imperius Curse?" he wondered bemusedly. The yelling continued more or less uninterrupted. "Oh, wait, yeah, you can't answer that if you're Imperiused, sorry," said Harry after a moment, frowning. Fake-Vernon bellowed something about him not listening, which to be fair was a legitimate complaint, and tried to grab him. Harry sidestepped, felt a vague sense of absent muscle memory, and wished for a wand. With a wand he could, for instance, hit this guy with a finite incantatem and see if his behavior changed. He didn't want to hurt the guy if he was some random innocent, possibly Muggle, guy who'd been enchanted. "Who the hell managed to put together such a convincing fake, anyway? Most people don't even know I've got a cousin - wow, don't hurt yourself," he added, as fake-Vernon's wild swings at him, increasingly furious, nearly propelled the ponderous man into the wall. Point in favor of him being Polyjuiced, most people weren't that clumsy in their own bodies. Although it was possible that actual Vernon Dursley really was that inept, given that over the course of seventeen very unfriendly years he had never actually managed to seriously injure Harry.

"What the hell are you talking about, boy?"

Okay, this line of question was going to go nowhere, he could tell. "_Accio_ wand?" Harry tried, making the relevant hand gesture. That usually worked if there was a reasonably compatible wand within a reasonably close range. A certain night of dragon-induced stress, and a tendency to get disarmed whenever someone managed to reflect his favorite spell back at him, had made him good at that spell in particular. Ron could do a better wandless blasting hex, Ginny could occasionally manage Disillusionment, and Hermione could block most jinxes without her wand _or_ her voice, but none of them could put a candle to Harry's summoning charm.

And ...

Nothing happened. He could feel his magic flex, feel the spell go off - but nothing happened. There weren't any wands within range. So this guy was probably actually an innocent Muggle enchanted to believe he was Vernon Dursley and that he should be extremely angry at this little boy who has just broken part of his house, not an evil wizard in disguise. Although, really, it was starting to get implausible that anyone who disliked Harry enough to set this up actually had enough background information about the Dursleys and his relationship to them that this charade hadn't broken down into pieces yet. He wasn't really listening, but he was pretty sure there was some convincingly insincere yelling about magic not being real in there, and it was hard to fake that precise kind of willful, angry self-delusion.

But if it wasn't a fake ... as was seeming increasingly likely ... that would imply that he was ... actually, really, in 1986.

Which seemed even less plausible, to be honest. And much, much worse.

"Faaaaantastic," sighed Harry. "This is going to be a great day, I can already tell."


	2. No, Seriously, What The Fuck

Petunia, or a very convincing facsimile thereof, turned up about ten minutes later. She started yelling too, but Harry didn't pay much attention to that, either. He was busy absently dodging maybe-not-fake-Vernon and muttering to himself. "No magic yet." The only sign so far of magic, at all, had been the fact that he'd woken up somewhere different than where he remembered going to sleep. Technically it was even probably possible to achieve that without magic, although he couldn't actually think of any plausible way anyone could have gotten him away from Ginny without a lot of magic and probably also a lot of sneaking. And the fact that this setup shouldn't have been possible without magic, since these people no longer existed. Well, they were alive last time he checked, but he hadn't spoken to either of them since he left their house for the last time; he was on Christmas-card terms with Dudley but that was about it.

(Speaking of - when he paid attention for a moment, he noticed that a small child, probably his cousin or the relevant imposter, was shrieking upstairs.)

So there had to be some magic going on. But he'd been unable to find any. "Not even any wands, so there's not even anyone in range watching?" This was a bizarrely realistic fake, if it was fake. Which meant he might have to provisionally accept that it might actually be happening. "Unless I'm crazy, I guess." He probably wasn't just a five year old with extremely creative delusions, though, because he _had_ actually broken through the cupboard door and he was pretty sure ordinary Muggle children couldn't do that without seriously injuring themselves. Plus, maybe-fake-Vernon would probably sound more sure about magic not being real, if it actually wasn't. Although he didn't appear to be in any particular immediate danger; the real Vernon generally just wanted to shake him up, not do him actual harm, and if this one was actually trying to kill him he wasn't doing a very good job of it.

So, problem-solving. "What can I do here?" he asked himself. He didn't have a wand, he wasn't big enough to be able to inflict incapacitating-but-not-lethal damage on this guy even if he was just an enchanted Muggle. The only thing he could even _maybe_ achieve without a wand was to poke someone's eyes out with his fingers, because that didn't actually require that much force, and that would be ... well ... _excessive _would probably be the right word. They weren't probably going to tell him anything useful, whether because they were Imperiused or they actually didn't know anything or they were actually his aunt and uncle or some combination. Which meant he couldn't use any of his standard problem-solving methods, really, except run away, and at the moment he was a little bit too curious what was going on to do that. "Hmm ... what would Hermione do?" What could he do without a wand? Hermione's standard practice when put under pressure while separated from her wand was to invent creative lies until she had it again, which he was terrible at. Ginny tended to make variably outlandish threats and/or flirt. Ron would just hit people until they gave him his wand back. Harry was pretty much terrible at all of those things. What else ... "Wait, I know." What could _any_ of them do without their wands? You could Animage. It didn't actually expend magic energy once you burned it into your magical core with the Animagus forming ritual, that was why Sirius had been able to do it in Azkaban. And that particular very rare skill was also one of the quickest ways on record to break Polyjuice.

Harry ducked, spread his wings, and abruptly was a bird.

Hermione had gone back to Hogwarts for her seventh year, because she cared about that kind of thing more than he and Ron did. She and Ginny had been so starved for things to do when they suddenly found themselves only doing homework and not, say, running entire resistance movements, that they'd gotten special dispensation and learned to be Animagi as an extra credit project for their NEWT Transfiguration class. (Hermione was, to her eternal delight, an otter; she had installed a huge pond in the backyard of her and Ron's house and waterproofed her entire library. Ginny had turned into a tiger, which was both terrifying and surprisingly adorable; George had pictures of an extremely confused Harry petting the tiger which had turned up without warning in his flat and demanded that he cuddle with it.) To exactly no one's surprise, they'd then spent most of the following summer teaching Harry and Ron to do the same thing. Ron was a red-tailed hawk and Harry was a peregrine falcon, and they had both been irrepressibly ecstatic for weeks after discovering that they could fly without broomsticks.

So Harry figured the obvious thing to try was the easy way to check whether he was under Polyjuice or otherwise made to look not like himself. One of the quirks of the Animagus transformation was that it cancelled any kind of illusion or Transfiguration, being insufficiently complex to do anything other than return the body to its unaltered state. It was related to how you couldn't hide or remove injuries using it; he'd learned the hard way, a few years ago, that it was also very dangerous to Animage while under the influence of medical magic. And so, with a brief thought and a shift of perspective, he was a bird.

Harry tried to take flight, failed, and promptly hit the floor in a confused ball of fluff. After a few minutes of flailing, he turned back into himself and narrowly rolled out of the way of a shrieking Petunia who'd tried to hit him with a broom.

He had not anticipated finding himself a _baby_ peregrine falcon, although on reflection this had probably been silly of him. And very tiny baby birds did not actually have enough wingspan to successfully oppose gravity, for all that they were composed almost entirely of hollow bones and fluff. He was lucky he was a _magic _tiny baby peregrine falcon, or he would probably have broken half of his bones by flinging himself so dramatically at the wooden floor.

At any rate, he was, upon returning to human form, still five years old. Or whatever. He wasn't really sure.

"Okaaay," said Harry, scrambling to his feet and continuing to ignore the background noise of his Muggle relatives losing their collective shit. Something something black sorcery something something evil demons, whatever. "So ... not Polyjuice, not human Transfiguration, not glamour ... does Animagus break De-Aging Potion?" He'd never checked, it had never come up before. "Damn. Um ... what would Hermione do, what would Hermione do ... test to distinguish cases ... what would be different if I was actually in 1986 that couldn't plausibly be faked?" In the background someone said something derisive about where he would be if it weren't the present, but that wasn't important, they would say that regardless of whether it were true. (At least his guess about where he was _supposed_ to be was right? Small victories.) In theory any particular additional person could probably be faked if you started from the point of assuming the perpetrators knew enough about his life to do such a freakishly accurate impression of the Dursleys, but the likelihood that it was a fake would go down the more people you checked, there had to be some resource limit on that. He didn't know of any way to block Apparition, so it'd be dramatically more likely to work if he tried going somewhere he'd expect to see real people and not fakes - actually, first check, what if he tried going to Privet Drive?

He spun on his heels and attempted to Apparate to the front hall of Number Four, Privet Drive.

He found himself roughly two feet away from where he'd started, with the shrieking at an even higher pitch because, as far as Petunia was concerned, five-year-old boys definitely should not be able to teleport. Even though he'd totally done that once before when he was little - no, that had been when he was seven or eight, wasn't it? Oh, well. "Okay, so this is the real house, awesome," sighed Harry. You couldn't Apparate into Azkaban and he didn't particularly want to, so he couldn't check if Sirius was there, which was too bad, it was much harder to impersonate dead people and it would take a lot of convincing before he'd trust a maybe-real Ron or Hermione or Ginny at this point, they would be the _obvious _people to impersonate and whoever was responsible for this had already demonstrated the ability to kidnap him in the middle of the night without waking up Ginny.

"Oh, wait."

Who should be dead in the present and _wasn't_ dead in 1986 and would be _really_ hard to convincingly fake and, for bonus points, would probably be extraordinarily helpful if it turned out Harry had somehow _actually_ been catapulted twenty years into the past?

Albus Dumbledore.

He couldn't Apparate to Hogwarts, of course, but he already knew he was actually at the Dursleys' house, and from the starting premise that he was magically in the past he could presume that the blood wards still existed and were powered by his presence, and he was pretty sure Dumbledore had some way of monitoring them ... "Hmm, how do I set off that alarm really fast?" he wondered. It had apparently been necessary that he return to the house at least once a year for a couple of weeks in order for them to work, and magic usually worked on intent, so if he just declared very definitively and honestly that he was never returning to Privet Drive ever again, it might actually collapse them on the spot ... that hadn't happened when he was thirteen, though, and at the time he hadn't really expected to ever go back ... It might be a slightly bad idea, he didn't know how much those wards had _actually_ protected him, but at least it would prevent Dumbledore from having an excuse to force him to come back here, if it turned out he really was a kid again. "Yeah, I want to do that, how do I do that?"

He could at least _try_ declaring intent never to return, he'd feel stupid if that was all he had to do and he didn't think to bother.

"This is not my home and I am leaving and never coming back," he announced loudly.

There was uninteresting yelling about how (a) that was illegal because he was five and (b) they'd be glad to be rid of him, the ungrateful wretch and (c) it'd serve him right when he starved to death, and so on, but he was more interested in the total lack of anything happening. He'd seen ward systems collapse, it was extremely dramatic and there was a lot of blue light, purple if they were blood-based. The total lack of response meant that hadn't worked even a little bit. "Great. Okay. Worth a shot," he grumbled. He wasn't really sure what else to try. He was kind of a shitty wardbreaker even with a wand, and these were pretty strong wards. And if he didn't break them Dumbledore probably would force him to stay here, which he didn't want to do even a little bit.

So summoning Dumbledore somehow might actually not be the best idea in the world, come to think of it.

"New plan," he muttered. Other people who were dead and therefore hard to impersonate. People he knew well enough to _distinguish_ from a _bad _impersonation. Fred was trivially easy to imitate with someone who wasn'tdead. Harry hadn't known Lavender well enough, nor Colin. Dobby would be at Malfoy Manor, not a good idea. Sirius was in Azkaban ... Remus? - _Tonks_. Tonks would be extremely hard to impersonate, Metamorphmagi were extraordinarily rare. You could probably do it with Teddy, in theory, he had pictures of his mother, but Harry was sort of dubious that he'd actually be able to convincingly imitate an adult. So Tonks would definitely be a good person to try to locate. How old would she be in 1986? She was, what, seven years older than him? She'd already been out of Auror training when he met her, so she had to have been at least twenty or twenty-one when he was fifteen, unless she'd finished training early, which seemed unlikely with Mad-Eye in charge; he wasn't the type to let anyone off easy. So, at least five or six years, maybe a little more, he didn't remember seeing her at Hogwarts but she'd been a Hufflepuff so if she'd been sixth or seventh year during his first year he probably wouldn't have noticed her. She might have been as young as ten when he was five. Wait, that meant they totally could get Teddy to impersonate her, he was seven, that wasn't that far off. Shit. And Andromeda had started Teddy on Imperius resistance training recently, she had a thing about that, but he probably wasn't _immune_ yet.

Who else? He could try the Burrow, it would be rather difficult to convincingly reconstruct the Burrow in the right place and populate it with _all_ the right fake Weasleys at the right ages, especially without drawing the attention of actual Weasleys or possibly Lovegood-Scamanders. But if he was actually in the past, he wasn't entirely sure that was a good idea. He was increasingly unsure that he should actually be letting anyone know what was going on, particularly not Dumbledore, because Dumbledore had spent years shutting him out due to his youth and inexperience and he wasn't at all confident that it wouldn't happen again. He could probably convince the Headmaster that he wasn't actually five years old, but he might inadvertently end up sounding like he had been possessed by Tom and getting locked in the dungeons for the rest of his natural life. That would be ... terrifyingly plausible, actually, he'd have to be careful of that one ...

... and if he showed up at the Burrow, Molly would call Dumbledore. Immediately. Without question. He loved that woman like his own mother, but she was nothing if not loyal to the Head of the Order of the Phoenix.

"This is hard," he grumbled, absently dodging a frying pan. Wow, they were trying harder now. Did he actually have a reason to still be here? Initially it had been because he was concerned that they might be innocent people that needed rescuing from the awful fate of being permanently convinced that they were Petunia and Vernon Dursley, but it was starting to feel increasingly likely that they actually were, in fact, Petunia and Vernon Dursley, and would continue to be so for the rest of their lives ... Wait, that wasn't right, he hadn't actually checked anything yet, he'd just invented a bunch of plausible reasons not to try. And he had no idea how well these people might have been educated or enchanted, so he didn't have any clear way of checking directly whether they were actually the people they appeared to be. He needed to try someone else. Which meant going somewhere else.

If they were really the Dursleys, was he coming back here? No.

If they _weren't_, did he have reason to still be here right _now_ instead of coming back to help them after he had figured out what was going on and got hold of a wand with which do so? ... Also no.

"Right, I'm leaving," he announced. There wasn't anything here he wanted, regardless of whether it was the real place or not; everything he owned was either at his own house (if it was still the present) or didn't yet belong to him (if it was the past). If this was a trap they'd probably be expecting him to try either going home or going straight to the Auror Office or going to Ron and Hermione's flat, so he avoided all three of those things. He didn't want to run into Dumbledore yet, he was pretty sure, so he also didn't go to Hogwarts or to the Burrow. He briefly considered trying Neville and then realized that a 1986 Neville obviously was neither at Hogwarts nor in his little flat above the Leaky Cauldron, and he didn't actually know where Augusta Longbottom lived. He could go to St. Mungo's and ask them to figure out why he was five, but if he was actually five they would just report him to the Ministry for being an unattended minor and there would be some sort of huge kerfuffle over him because, well, he was Harry Potter.

So he went back to his very first plan, and he Apparated to Azkaban.

You couldn't actually Apparate into the prison, but he just picked the most familiar accessible point nearby, the one Aurors used for guard shift changes.

He realized almost immediately that this had been stupid, because he was greeted instantly with startled yells and the sound of people drawing wands. He also realized almost immediately that this was probably adequate proof that he was really in the past. He recognized Dawlish and Savage, both of whom looked younger than he remembered, and it actually did seem slightly more likely that he was actually in the past for some reason than that some unknown person or people had managed to take over and replace the Azkaban guard detail without setting off any alarms. Someone had actually tried that once, and set off a half dozen ancient security charms that had been there since well before Mad-Eye retired. Shacklebolt had immediately replaced the spells and given everyone a lecture about Adequate Paranoia.

So this was probably going to suck, because he knew nothing about time travel except that it was almost invariably a complete disaster, even if it sometimes let you save lots of lives, and fuck, if it was really 1986 that meant Tom was still alive, he was going to have to do everything all over again and oh, hell, this was going to be awful.

But on the bright side: there were now wands in his range.

He ducked three Stunners, pointed his index finger at Matt Savage (who was considerably more dangerous than Dawlish) and said clearly, "Accio wand!", and then suddenly there was one in his hand. He had to dodge and block five more subdual spells in the process - two from Dawlish, one from Savage who could cast a wandless Stunning Jinx albeit more slowly than the normal kind, and two from, he had to assume, an invisible Proudfoot. John Proudfoot spent the vast majority of his field time invisible, as he did an excellent Disillusionment Charm and didn't much like people paying attention to him; it was, on average, safe to assume that if you saw Savage, Proudfoot was somewhere in the vicinity.

But now he was armed, and even if these weren't fake Aurors, well ... it was 1986. The war had been over for five years, everyone was a little out of practice, and Amelia Bones was vastly under-supplied with resources and competent staff. Dawlish was mostly useless. Savage and Proudfoot were good, but they were relatively new to their jobs; they'd still been in training when the first war ended. They hadn't had unarmed combat training, they hadn't had how to deal with people doing excessively weird shit training, they had had to learn all that by experience that they didn't have, yet. And he was visibly a little kid; he was missing a bunch of his muscle memory, but his instincts were all still there, and they weren't expecting him to fight like an Auror. They were not, for that matter, expecting him to fight like Harry Potter, who, he had been told, fought like an erratic nutcase because he'd been in more honest-to-god fights to the death than most Aurors long before anyone had ever actually tried to teach him how to duel.

He whited out the alarm transmitters first thing. Then he slid sideways, Stunned Dawlish, lit up Proudfoot and a good fraction of Savage with a shower of glowing scarlet glitter, and giggled slightly hysterically when they both started swearing colorfully (Savage in Greek). Now he could _see _both of them, and two on one was a fight he could _do_ when one of them was unarmed. He smirked and regretted it immediately when Savage gave him a very suspicious look that suggested he knew five-year-olds did not make that facial expression. He blocked a half a dozen increasingly creative hexes, shattered Savage's haphazard and mostly Proudfoot-powered shields, missed completely at the attempt to Stun him, and dodged several more spells. If nothing else, his muscle memory already contained the instructions for _duck_. As Harry was reinforcing his own shields, Proudfoot said incredulously, "Is that _Harry Potter_?"

"Nope," said Harry immediately, "just a very good imitation," because he didn't especially want to get arrested. He was going to have to Obliviate them both anyway, though, because he _failed utterly_ to keep the sarcasm out of his tone, though not for lack of trying. Then he took advantage of the distraction to break Proudfoot's excellent shielding, slide jaggedly sideways to dodge a slowdown curse, and Stun him. Then he was one-on-one with Savage. Savage was probably the best duellist of the three by far, but he also currently didn't have a wand or decent shielding, so it took Harry about the space of five seconds to take him down. Then he confiscated Proudfoot and Dawlish's wands, handcuffed all three to convenient furniture, and Obliviated them of his presence, before he scurried down the steps. He had at absolute best maybe ten minutes before they missed their fifteen-minute-interval radio check-in and the alarms went off, even assuming none of them had done that the moment he'd shown up.

So he'd have to worry about the more complex implications of suddenly being twenty years in the past later.

Right now he had a godfather to rescue.


	3. This Was Not A Good Idea

Harry took a brief, necessary moment to seal the doors behind him. The stack of spells he used wouldn't be _that _difficult to break, especially for Aurors, but it would give him a little bit of precious time.

He was barely halfway down the steps to the minus-first floor (Azkaban was almost entirely underground, despite being on a shallow island; Harry had honestly never bothered to wonder how that worked) when the alarms started blaring loudly. He winced; that was much faster than he'd expected. They must have been close to their check-in time when he dropped in. This would have been an extremely convenient moment to be a peregrine falcon, Harry was sure, but apparently he wasn't old enough to fly. Hermione had this theory that little kids could be taught to Animage, like how they were better at languages and wandless magic, but apparently there might be a flaw in that scheme. Although, he supposed, it was probably less of a flaw if you weren't a bird. Ginny-the-tiny-tiger-kitten would probably be the most adorable thing to ever exist, and he didn't doubt she would still be extremely dangero -

_Fuck, Ginny wasn't going to remember him._

Harry indulged in approximately ten seconds of crushing misery about this realization as he ran, and then he realized that he was in range of the Dementor Guards of Azkaban and this was not, at all, the time. Instead he chose not to think about Ginny for the moment and summoned, mostly by force of will, the mental image of Ron and Hermione's wedding, all paper roses and sunshine and irrepressible smiles on the faces of his dearest friends. The wrong images kept swimming into his head: Dumbledore falling off the Tower, Hermione screaming under Bellatrix's knife, Ron storming away in the middle of a nameless forest. After two unsuccessful attempts with Savage's wand he swapped to Proudfoot's, stumbling along the hallway with a sort of desperate fervor. _No, no, no, I will not be defeated by stupid mindless monsters, I am stronger than this, I am, think of family, think of Ginny Ron Hermione Teddy Andromeda Molly Arthur - _

At last, to his relief, silver-white Prongs shimmered into existence beside him, loping easily alongside his short-legged sprint and pushing away the creeping soul-stopping cold. He had never been good at coping with the fear aura; even now, after the war, his boggart remained a dementor. He'd spent a long time wondering if that made him a terrible person, that he was still more afraid of the monster than he was of the deaths of people he loved. Hermione and Ron both got corpse boggarts, these days. He'd gotten over it, slowly, after Ginny quietly told him that her boggart was still sixteen-year-old Tom Marvolo Riddle. Still - He had to pause for a moment, lean on his knees, and take a few deep, shuddering breaths.

Then, after that moment, he could afford no further pause. The alarms were blaring. Whoever had been on office shift was probably already upstairs, discovering the unconscious and disarmed bodies of their colleagues. They'd be calling for off-duty backup and trying to break through the door, and although the first thing would take some actual time, the second one might only give Harry as much as a few minutes. Which meant he was about to have probably half a dozen Aurors on his tail, and they _definitely_ ran faster than he did. So he had to make the best of the few minutes he had. Fortunately, he'd been part of the unlucky crew that had to clear this place out when it had been restored from being Voldemort's Super Evil Fortress Of Doom. Shacklebolt had made them write reports on every inch of the building; Harry knew where he was going. The 'high-security' cells reserved for life-term political terrorists i.e. Death Eaters were on the bottom floor, farthest from the door, because of course they were. Sirius would be there, and he could get out of his cell as Padfoot, and Harry could hand him a wand, and -

- he didn't actually have a plan further than that.

The sound of Hermione lecturing him about irresponsible recklessness echoed in his ears as he scrambled down the steps to minus-three, the bottom floor (when your entire country's population was less than ten thousand, you didn't actually need your prisons to be very _big_). As he ran past the confused Dementors - unable to reach him past Prongs, they only milled angrily - he could also hear the sound of Bellatrix Lestrange laughing. In his head, not in real life, he was at least sixty percent sure. Because, well, the _last _time he'd flung himself headlong into rescuing Sirius without a coherent plan, it had gone more or less precisely the most wrong, hadn't it? Hadn't he learned his lesson the first time? Or the second time, or the third time, or the fifty-seventh time, no, of course not, people just kept dying because he didn't know what he was doing, didn't they? Seventy-nine dead at the Battle of Hogwarts, some of them children, and they'd been the side that won. Harry had every one of their names burned into his soul, and he could hear their voices telling him how stupid he was. But the voices weren't real, those people were _still alive_, he told himself strainedly, pulling his Patronus closer. _Shut up, shut up,_ he hissed at the monsters as he ran down the hall, and only much, much later would he realize he had been spitting Parseltongue.

He almost ran right past Sirius.

He would have, if not for the sound his godfather made when he spotted him. It sounded like sort of high-pitched, horrified gasp, like a wince made audible. It sounded like desperate, confused relief and longing. It sounded like more or less exactly what you might expect a man to produce if you took the most important person in his life, murdered that person, took that person's forearm bone and sharpened it into a knife, and then stabbed him through the heart with it. It sounded like, _"Prongs - ?_"

"Shit," said Harry, skidding to an undignified halt. Sirius's head turned sharply, and he stared at Harry, eyes wide and shocked and white. He had, very clearly, noticed the Patronus _first _and the caster _second_. Harry could only imagine what sort of confusion he might now be experiencing at discovering the presence of his very five-year-old godson. So long as he managed to explain himself before Sirius fairly reasonably concluded that he'd been possessed by Voldemort, it would probably be fine. Assuming, of course, that Harry didn't get arrested and thrown in jail right next to him. "Sorry, hi, no time to explain, I've got a wand for you, we need to _leave, right now_."

"Who the hell are you and why is your Patronus Prongs?" demanded Sirius, his voice shaky but coherent.

"Uh, I'm Harry?" said Harry, bouncing nervously on his toes. "C'mon, the alarms are going off upstairs, we've got like _minutes, tops _before there are more Aurors in my face than I can remotely plausibly handle when they're actually expecting a fight." He was good, but he'd been _lucky_. Matt Savage, ordinarily quite dangerous even so early in his career, had been completely unprepared to be disarmed by a five-year-old, and the others hadn't adjusted fast enough to handle the loss of initiative. He'd Obliviated them, so whoever came down here wasn't going to be expecting him either, but they _were _going to be on guard for _something _bizarre and dangerous. He had a wand now, and in a moment so would Sirius, but you could only be so outnumbered before no amount of surprise would save you.

Unfortunately, Sirius was still giving him a look that suggested he had no idea what was going on. "Who? Harry who?" he asked, frowning, and totally failing to slip the bars of his cell or even admit that he had any idea how to do that.

What did he mean, Harry wh -

"_Fuck_," said Harry. Dementors fed on happy memories. That was what they did. When you spent any amount of time in Azkaban, they sucked your happy memories out of you. You could recover them, of course. It was possible to entirely recover from even an extended trip to Azkaban, in fact, given time and support and a great deal of chocolate, but the key word there was _time_. Nearly a full year had passed between when Sirius escaped from Azkaban and when Harry had met him, during which time Sirius had been propelled entirely or almost entirely by hatred of Wormtail. Harry's parents were probably the subject of Sirius' worst memory, the image of them lying dead which (having been among Snape's memories) haunted Harry as well. _Them_ he could not forget, any more than he could forget his raging need for Peter Pettigrew to be dead. That wasn't a happy memory. But Harry? Harry had been one year old when Sirius lost him, a tiny ball of green-eyed joy who chased James' cat on his toy broomstick and couldn't pronounce 'Moony' properly. Harry would probably have been, in his entirety, a happy memory ...

Sirius could easily not have remembered Harry existed until the day he met him again in the Shrieking Shack. Until then he hadn't actually done anything that suggested he knew he had a godson, for all that everyone assumed he was after Harry; he'd been stalking _Ron_, the person he knew to be keeping Wormtail as a pet. He'd broken into Gryffindor Tower, gone after Ron, and not paid any more attention to Harry than he had to Neville or Seamus or Dean. He'd made friends with Crookshanks and stolen passwords from Neville, and never tried to contact - no, wait, that wasn't right. He'd sent Harry a Firebolt for Christmas. So he'd at least remembered by then. But that was close to six months' delay, and Harry really didn't have time for that right now.

He had, at best, perhaps a minute.

"You don't remember me because of the Dementors, I think," he said, willing his voice to remain steady, "but I know you're innocent and I need you to trust me."

Sirius frowned suspiciously at him. "Why should I?"

"Look, Wormtail is still alive," tried Harry. Sirius seemed strangely inclined just sit right where he was, as if there was no point in going and being depressed elsewhere when he could just be depressed here. "You can't do anything about that if you just _sit _here," he pressed. Maybe Sirius thought sticking around near the Dementors would keep the Patronus around longer, or he already thought Harry was Voldemort or some other Death Eater, or he thought he was hallucinating or something. "I already know about the Marauders, you don't need to keep it secret from me, just turn into Padfoot and get through the bars and let's _go _before I get arrested and we _both _spend the rest of our natural lives in prison while the real traitor walks free!"

_That _was a convincing argument, apparently. A moment later, in a wriggling blur of shaggy black fur, Sirius was standing next to him, holding out a hand for a wand. Harry handed him Savage's and turned on his heel to run, wincing as the sound of crashing upstairs heralded the success of the Aurors at breaking through his haphazard door seal. They were going to have to run up the stairs anyway to get out, there was only one entrance or exit to Azkaban Prison, and the faster they did that the better. It probably wasn't plausible that the two of them could actually _win _a fight against whatever maybe-competent people the Department of Magical Law Enforcement could scramble in five minutes, but they might be able to distract them for long enough to run past the ward lines and Disapparate. They only really needed to get out fast enough that they were gone before more reinforcements showed up. God only knew what they would do if someone managed to get hold of Director Bones.

Harry barely made it three short steps before Sirius made an irritated, dismissive sound, scooped him up with one arm, and took off at a frankly terrifying sprint. _Right_, thought Harry, hastily twisting into something like a good aiming position with his wand. He had forgotten, again, that he was physically five years old, and that Sirius was, even half-starved, roughly three times his size and capable of running a great deal faster even while carrying him. This was going to be _really_ difficult to get used to if it turned out to be permanent. And so far the world did actually seem to be behaving as if he had actually been magically transported into the body of his younger self, so he was going to have to assume that was the case unless given reason to believe otherwise. _  
><em>

On the bright side, Sirius seemed to know what he was doing. As well he should; there had been a war going on around four years previously, and unlike most of the Ministry-employed police, Sirius had been actively participating. With a wand in his hand, he was glittering blue and purple with half a dozen different shield charms by the time he hit the staircase.

Harry had about thirty seconds to consider where the hell they were even going to _go_ - he realized suddenly that he didn't even know what _season_ it was - before Sirius ran into range of Kingsley Shacklebolt about halfway across minus-two. Sirius showed no signs of recognizing him. He just sidestepped a nasty-looking curse and kept running, as the man who would someday be Minister for Magic wheeled about angrily. Kingsley tried several different ways to catch or trip them while visibly freaking out about the realization that Sirius was carrying a small child with him, but he did keep trying. On the other hand, the shock, to Harry's deep and eternal relief, actually delayed the reactions of the rest of the _six _other people in the hallway (none of whom he recognized) for just the few seconds that he needed to hit half of them with Stunning Jinxes. In that time, Sirius - still running full-out - hit the others with what looked to Harry like Concussion Hexes, and then they were on the second staircase with Kingsley in hot pursuit.

As Sirius scrambled up the steps, Harry twisted awkwardly in his grip, trying to lean over his shoulder. Sirius helpfully shifted his arm slightly, and Harry steadied himself on Sirius' shoulder and pointed his wand backwards at Kingsley. The young Auror was running after them bouncing hexes off of Sirius' shield charms and, to his credit, not interrupting his casting with swearing as so many people did when they were under stress. He also had shields working, but Harry knew a couple of shield breaker hexes that hadn't actually been invented until the 2000's, which was why he'd been able to take down Proudfoot and Savage as quickly as he had. As soon as he had a clear shot, he fired one off, and then hesitated to follow it up.

They were in the middle of a staircase; if Kingsley fell backwards, he might actually -

Harry barely blocked a Disarming Jinx, and would have slapped himself if he had the time. He was being stupid. Kingsley was a _wizard_. He could fall thirty feet vertically and _maybe _break his arm. Throwing him down the stairs would, at best, leave him some bruises tomorrow. Harry didn't want to _kill _anyone, especially not people just doing their jobs who didn't know Sirius wasn't a Death Eater, but he didn't mind slightly inconveniencing them. "_Stupefy!_" he yelled, and immediately hated his own high-pitched voice. Back to silent spells until further notice, he decided, wincing as Kingsley deflected the stunbolt barely inches away from the back of Sirius' knee.

They were at the top of the stairs. Harry, who had been stupid enough to wait for Kingsley to put his shields back up, broke them again and _immediately_ Stunned him, just in time for Sirius to swear loudly and fling himself to the ground. A moment later it was obvious to Harry why, as a sizzling pepper grenade sailed just over his head, hit the wall behind them, and exploded extremely loudly. One of the things he had _not _been delighted to learn about the existence of when he joined the actual police force, pepper grenades were enchanted to explode on impact and were full of incendiary magical pepper dust that got into _everything _and burned like acid anywhere it touched you. They were extremely expensive and difficult to make, but their actual intended use was to incapacitate criminals who tried to break out of custody.

Your first instinct was to try to use _aguamenti _to get the awful stuff off you - it was hot and dry, after all - and Harry had to actually actively stop himself from doing that without thinking. He could feel it on his hands and his face and sliding down the back of his shirt and oh, wow, this was much more painful than he'd been expecting. Sirius was already struggling to keep hold of him, he'd gotten more of it than Harry had and he was burning all his attention trying to keep his shields up. But Harry knew the actual correct thing to do, because that was in the official briefing along with how to correctly use the grenades (you _were _supposed to try to hit people with them, preferably center of mass). You freeze them out. "_Frigideiro_," snapped Harry, breaking his own resolution from half a minute before, because he needed the extra force giving his voice to the spell would provide.

Sirius scrambled to his feet again immediately, to the sounds of shocked yells in all directions, and was off like a shot for the front gates. They almost made it, too; they got to five feet from the gates.

Harry heard an unfamiliar voice shout, "_Crucio!_", and the Unforgivable curse ripped right through Sirius' shielding charms and into his spine.

Sirius stumbled and fell.


	4. This Was Also Not A Good Idea

"WHAT FUCKING IDIOT JUST DID THAT?" shrieked Harry, as Sirius collapsed, making a horrible keening sound. Harry found that he was on his own feet again, suddenly, sparkling with aura light. Everything around him was dust and red pepper and flying spells. He didn't have any idea, really, how many people were here, but suddenly he wanted to fight all of them. He hated his voice, but whatever, he'd get over it, someone was _torturing his godfather_, he was going to _actually kill someone,_ "I am going to _murder you_ who the _fuck_ - "

"No (aaaaah) don't," gasped Sirius, from the ground. He sounded strained, like it was taking a huge amount of concentration just to form words. Harry knew the feeling; the Cruciatus Curse was like having all of your nerves whited out, and all the same he was visibly struggling to put himself between Harry and the opposing Aurors. "Get - _run,_ - "

Harry was staggered for a brief moment by the fact that Sirius Black would rather be Cruciated than let a child - a child he _didn't know _- get in trouble on his behalf. Maybe he thought it was likely that Harry was actually an adult in disguise and would get thrown into Azkaban, a fate perhaps worse than death. It wasn't like Harry was _acting _like a little kid. But still: Sirius had just demonstrated that he was willing to be Cruciated to protect a stranger. Harry ... honestly would not have expected that. He'd seen Sirius at fifteen think it was hilarious to dangle a classmate upside down by his ankle. At _thirty-five_ the man had still not really seemed to regret it. For a baseline random child to whom he had no particular attachment, and plausible reasons to suspect might be a Death Eater (such as, _good Light wizards do not use tactics like 'pretend to be a small child' _and _actual small children cannot cast Patronuses _and _all the Light wizards think Sirius Black is evil_)? He loved Sirius dearly, but Harry would have expected, at best, professional teamwork. Maybe. _  
><em>

He was going to have to reevaluate his own judgment of his godfather.

Later.

When he wasn't being shot at.

_Homenum revelio, _he thought, spinning on his heels to get a view of his surroundings. Eight people, spread across the gate and entryway to easily target anyone running from door to gate. Probably not all of them Aurors, then. The entire Auror Corps was usually, at the high end, sixteen people; it was an elite subsection of British Magical Law Enforcement and Magical Britain was a small place. Harry had taken out three on his arrival and he knew Shacklebolt, at least, was another. The other six they'd taken down on their way out of the building might have been hitwizards, but Harry was willing to be at least _one _had been another young Auror, they almost never sent them out alone. And he hadn't seen Mad-Eye yet (thank Merlin), so the _entire _rest of the Auror Corps was probably at most nine, and that was assuming they'd managed to replace the Longbottoms in a timely manner, which wasn't honestly that likely. And at any given time usually at least a quarter of the Corps were asleep, since someone had to do the night shifts. So some of these people were not Aurors, just whatever hitwizards had been on hand in the MLE offices. If Harry had to guess he'd say it'd be the four holding shields on the gate. There were three guys spamming Stunning Jinxes which Harry's shields were so far protecting him from, and - no. Not a random hitwizard. Gawain Robards, a man that Harry had kicked off his force twenty years from now for assaulting Narcissa Malfoy. The kind of man who thought it was fair that Dark wizards be punished in pain and suffering for their crimes and he, not the legal system, was the one best suited to inflict that pain regardless of whether anyone had bothered to produce evidence of wrongdoing or have such pesky things as a trial -

_you__._

_I'm going to kill you, personally, in particular._

_maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but you are going to die. _

Harry leveled his wand at the idiot and hummed _sonorus_ under his breath, so that he could project without his voice jumping registers into the stratosphere. "You," he said flatly, "have exactly five seconds to stop that, or I will personally see to it that the short remainder of your life is absolute, unmitigated hell."

One of the gate guards said, confused, "Is that _Harry Potter_?"

This turned out to be an adequate distraction, regardless of whether the threat would have sufficed. Robards yelped in surprise and the Cruciatus broke. Sirius breathed a deep, shaky sigh of relief, tried to get up, and failed. Harry smiled at the Aurors, who had all stopped shooting at him and were now just looking confused. He was feeling a vague sense that his favorite tactic of looking pleasantly calm and subtly threatening was going to come across more just _creepy_ when he was a little kid. He'd gotten into that habit because everything else in the world was just so much less scary than Voldemort that ordinary criminals were mostly just sort of pathetic and pitiful, and then he'd found himself using his own calmness as an emotional weapon. But that only worked because he was Chief Auror Harry Potter the Man Who Defeated Voldemort (Twice). Right now he was facing the Aurors as the very small Boy-Who-Lived, about whom they knew nothing except that he had mysteriously maybe-defeated Voldemort at the age of approximately fifteen months, and then gone to live with Muggles. Oh, well. He was just going to have to be ridiculous at people until they started taking him seriously, probably. "I cannot confirm or deny that I am the Boy-Who-Lived," he said, shifting his stance slightly, defensively, and wondering how long it would take before they started shooting at him again. Ideally, long enough that Sirius - breathing unevenly and shivering - would be able to get up.

"That's _totally_ Harry Potter," said one of the hitwizards, sounding shocked.

"No I'm not," said Harry, just to be ornery. Also, because he suspected that even though the Auror manual _said _'never talk in the middle of a firefight, especially not to your enemies', his present opponents seemed to have entirely forgotten about that rule. Accordingly, he was going to distract them for as long as possible, and lecture them about it later.

"But he's got the scar and everything," said the first one, gesturing with her free hand at Harry's forehead.

"Are you _sure _you're not Harry Potter?" said someone.

Now that Sirius was no longer actively being tortured, Harry could relax slightly, though only slightly. It was enough, though, that he slipped easily into his default mode. Which is to say, he stopped being a variably terrifying, excessively altruistic soldier, and resumed being a sarcastic little shit. "No, I'm Lucius Malfoy," he drawled, "couldn't you tell?"

"_What_?" said another one of his opponents, incredulously.

Another of the gate guards sighed. She said tiredly, "He's fucking with us."

"You win a cookie," said Harry, pointing at the guy who'd spoken and smirking. "'Course I'm fucking with you." At his feet, Sirius made a sound that might have been a badly stifled snicker. Good, he was recovering. This was totally working. "Being as annoying as possible is basically my whole shtick. What'd you think I defeated the Dark Lord with, my super powerful fifteen-month-old bare hands?" Yep, he was totally implying that he had defeated Voldemort using sarcasm. See how long it took them to figure that one out. Come to think of it, Tom was really bad at dealing with people not being terrified of him, that might actually be a valid strategy ...

"Hell is _he _doing with _Black_?" said the one who'd questioned his confidence in his own identity.

"Breaking him out," said Harry promptly. "Sorry, I thought that was obvious."

There was a pause during which the guards all exchanged nervous, confused looks. Some poor soul was elected by popular vote to ask the question they were all thinking - or, in other words, everyone glared at the newest guy until he caved. He asked: "_Why_?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Because I'm secretly Voldemort and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to leave all the clever Slytherins in jail and break out the one Gryffindor who isn't capable of subtlety even if you Imperiused him," he deadpanned. "Because he's _innocent,_ you nitwits!" Okay, he hadn't actually been planning on doing that. His original plan, inasmuch as there had been a plan at all, had been to say nothing, run like hell, hunt down Wormtail, throw him at MLE, and trust Director Bones to do her job. After which, who knew. But whatever, if they got out of this alive it was going to be all over the news regardless of what he said. Might as well make sure _someone _actually knew the real reason he was here, before Rita Skeeter started plastering _Dark Lord Harry Potter _all over the evening _Prophet. _If he was really lucky, one or two of them might even believe him. _  
><em>

They all stared at him.

The other door guard, who hadn't spoken yet, was the first to recover. He said, in a surprisingly gentle voice, "Um, I realize you weren't there, but ... you _do _know that he murdered thirteen people in broad daylight, right?"

"So I hear," said Harry, shrugging. "I'm entirely sure it's not true. Unfortunately, at the moment I don't have convincing proof, which is why we are having this conversation _here _instead of, for instance, the MLE petitions courtroom." He glanced for just a moment down at Sirius, who had stopped shivering and was very slowly rearranging himself, without drawing anyone's attention, into a position where he could get up off the ground very quickly. Good. That meant these guys only needed to be distracted for a little bit longer. "So, Auror Roobards," Harry pronounced the name deliberately incorrectly, just to annoy him, "you have an Unforgivable license, I see?"

"Of course," said Robards stiffly, giving him an irritable look. "It would be irresponsible of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement not to have some elite members of its staff who fully understand the Dark magic that our enemies might choose to wield against us."

It sounded like a stock response; he'd probably had to say that to at least one reporter. He was old enough to have been on the force long enough to have been around when Barty Crouch (senior) was pushing for that law in the first place; maybe he'd spoken to the Wizengamot about it. Regardless, it would have been convincing, except ... well. Harry had been present for the very long recitation under Veritaserum of every case of unnecessarily brutal vigilante justice that Robards had ever carried out. Harry smirked at him. "Oh, is _that _why you eviscerated Rosier?"

This reply did not have precisely the intended effect. Harry had been _hoping _that Robards would get defensive and try to argue. An argument was an ideal way to keep everyone paying attention to Harry and not to Sirius. A slightly better case would be for some of the others to either get annoyed at their excessively-brutal supervisor or try to defend him, but it was fine if he didn't get that. Unfortunately, he didn't even get the main thing he was going for. Instead he had just provided them reason to believe he was, in fact, a disguised Death Eater. The event in question had taken place some years previously and was not, at this time, known to anyone outside the Office except for the Death Eaters who'd escaped from the same building.

It was immediately obvious to Harry that this had been a stupid thing to say, because he could _see _the expressions on everyone's faces change: _oh, he's just trying to Slytherin us._ They had all immediately concluded from his reference to this information that he shouldn't have that he must be a liar and a Death Eater.

Robards, teeth bared in a nasty snarl, pointed his wand at Harry's nose and hit him full in the face with a Cruciatus Curse.

"Wow, fuck you," said Harry.

There was a pause during which everyone stared at him, slightly incredulous, and Robards gave a confused frown to his wand, which was still producing the sickly grey light that indicated he had cast the curse successfully.

Harry added, proud of the way his voice wavered only slightly, "We're leaving."

Sirius took this as the cue it was, picked him up on his way to his feet, spoke three different unfamiliar charms very quickly, and took a running jump at the shielded ward lines. Harry's shields - not broken, only failing to block the Unforgivable Curse that had been leveled at him - ate a dozen different hexes, wavered, and broke. To everyone's shock, including Harry's, Sirius actually cleared seven feet, sailing _over _the line of guards and their shiny stacked shields, and then they were through the edge of the Anti-Apparition shell, and they had Disapparated before they hit the ground.


	5. Where The Hell Are We

They landed ... somewhere.

It was dark, reasonably temperate, and seemed to involve a large number of deciduous trees.

Sirius put down Harry very carefully, and then slid to the ground, inhaling deeply and gratefully. Harry, for his part, fell flat on his back, stared up at the starry sky, and said, "Ow."

"You," said Sirius, sounding puzzled and impressed, "just took a Cruciatus to the face and didn't even _flinch_."

"_You_ jumped like ten feet vertically," pointed out Harry. People did not ordinarily have that ability. _Horses _did not generally have that ability, he was pretty sure. Large dogs certainly didn't, and in any case Sirius had done it in human form.

"Standard flight booster charms, they're not hard," said Sirius dismissively. To be fair, Harry thought, the man _had _built a flying motorcycle, hadn't he. "Ignoring Unforgivables, on the other hand, not so simple." He gave Harry a searching look.

"I'm used to it," said Harry with a shrug. This was a vast oversimplification of the actual explanation, but he didn't really feel up to the complete story at the moment. In short, he and Ron had had an extremely unpleasant experience to which they had responded by putting themselves through frankly excessive resistance training, under the theory that if you could train immunity to the Imperius, you could do the same with the Cruciatus. It would not be remembered as the most enjoyable several months of their lives, but it _had _worked. Sort of. It turned out you couldn't actually reject the curse itself without medical-grade anaesthesia charms, and even that didn't work very well. You could only train yourself to _act _normal under its influence. But that was all they needed, to prevent a repeat incident of being totally incapacitated in the middle of a rescue mission.

Which, Harry was pleased to note, had totally just paid off.

"So, you still don't remember me," he checked.

"I have no idea who you are," agreed Sirius. "My _best guess _is that you're Hex Vector."

Harry blinked bemusedly at the sky. "Um, no? Who's that?"

Sirius sighed. "I'll take that as a no? Kid I went to school with. He and his twin sister Sept were the Ravenclaw prefects for our class year. Really observant, kind of sarcastic, hung around the Slytherins occasionally but not constantly, not fond of liars, decent duellist who could have gotten better while I wasn't looking. He's the only person I could think of who could plausibly have known about me being an Animagus _and _known the Death Eaters well enough to know how Willem Rosier died _and _who might care enough about proper dispensation of justice to want to break me out of Azkaban. Doesn't explain the Patronus, or why you're, what, five? ... but it was the best I could come up with."

"Saying I'm Harry Potter doesn't help?" offered Harry hopefully.

Sirius gave him a blank look. "Nnnno? Should it?"

Damn it. "Um, because it implies that James and Lily Potter were my parents?" Please don't say _who?,_ please don't say -

"Who?"

_Damn it._

"You look extremely alarmed," observed Sirius, somewhat unhappily.

"You're missing more than I thought," explained Harry, sighing. "Okay, hold on, let's start from the beginning here. You're aware that Dementors feed on happy memories, right?"

Sirius nodded. "Yeah. I'm ... I guess I'm _abstractly_ aware that I've forgotten things. For instance, I'm pretty sure that if my relationship with my little brother was _quite _as universally toxic as I remember, I would not have been nearly as nice to him when I was twelve or for that matter failed to murder him when I was eighteen. But obviously I mostly have no real sense of what I've forgotten, anywhere I don't have obvious markers."

It had been thirteen years of Azkaban, not four, the first time Harry met Sirius. With a vague sad feeling he realized that the Sirius he had known had probably eventually run out of directly pleasant memories and started losing meta-memories; that is, he'd started forgetting that he knew he'd forgotten things. And so in 1995 he had had nothing nice at all to say about his little brother, not even the cogent observation that he didn't have anything nice to say and _probably should_. Harry sighed. "Right. Okay. I think, in theory, that you'll probably get a lot of that back, over time, if you look for it." Sirius of 1995 had been able to tell stories about the Marauders, sometimes even complete ones if Remus helped. He'd been isolated and trapped and he'd _still_ been recovering, slowly but surely. And _this _Sirius had not been under the influence of the Dementors for nearly as long. "But you do retain some information that isn't completely terrible? You remember Prongs?"

Sirius winced. "I mean ... mostly, I think? I _recognized _him, I recognize that that's who your Patronus is. I realize that he and his wife are the people who died when Wormtail decided to turn on us, I'm aware that they were the most important people in my life. But if I try to remember who they were, I mostly get this recurring mental image of finding them dead, and otherwise I just get him sulking and her yelling and nobody ever smiling. I don't even," he swallowed, "I don't remember their names."

This hit Harry rather hard, and he had to take a second before he continued. But - that was information Sirius in 1993 had _had._ Given how difficult it would have been for him to consult a library, Harry was going to optimistically hope that this was because he'd recovered it on his own. Which boded ... at least sort of well. And in the meantime: "I have that memory too," said Harry, quietly. "It's the subject of nightmares. Their names were James and Lily Potter, and they were my parents. You are my godfather." _  
><em>

Sirius absorbed this, and then stared at him, half disbelieving and half utterly astonished.

"You can't _actually _be a little kid," objected Sirius. He was self-aware enough not to say _I__ don't remember them having a baby,_ but he did have a point. Harry was just completely and obviously not acting like a five-year-old, and Sirius had been taking it as granted that he was somehow disguised.

"I am ... _sort of _actually a little kid?" said Harry. He debated with himself, for a long moment, whether to tell the truth. He probably wasn't going to tell _everyone_, or even more than a very few people. He was still not at all sure whether he should tell Dumbledore. Things would get strange and awful extremely quickly if it got out that he was from the future. Whereas if he just went about being ridiculuous at everyone and fixing problems without warning, he might actually be able to significantly improve the outcome of the Second Wizarding War. The best option was likely to be for him to stay the hell away from the wizarding world until he was eleven, and then just let people assume he was precocious. Still - _Sirius _deserved to know, he thought. And Sirius had never been as staunchly loyal to Dumbledore as Remus was, so he could probably be convinced to keep things quiet.

"What d'you mean?" asked Sirius after the pause had dragged on for a little while.

Harry sighed. "This is going to be a really long story, hang on."

* * *

><p>A great many hours later ...<p>

* * *

><p>" ... and I decided to go straight to Azkaban and try to break you out, which was a terrible idea and I did not plan it very well at all, sorry about that."<p>

"Hey, neither of us is dead or arrested, I think you did good," said Sirius, smiling faintly. He'd absorbed everything Harry had to say with a minimum of incredulity, although he admitted freely that he would have been _considerably_ more suspicious if not for the whole _Harry's Patronus is Prongs_ thing, and the fact that Harry could correctly describe the location of the cottage in Godric's Hollow, among other things. He'd listened with fascination to Harry's entire life story, frowning and smiling in all the right places. The story of what had really happened to Regulus had utterly silenced him for several long minutes, and the story of the Battle of Hogwarts had made him actually applaud, particularly when Harry described Neville's heroic speech and successful summoning of the Sword of Gryffindor.

Then Harry had told him about what happened in the Forbidden Forest.

And Sirius had _stared _at him with an absolutely unfathomable look on his face.

Then, suddenly, like a dam breaking, his expression exploded into a smile wider and brighter than any Harry had ever seen his godfather produce, including in the photographs of his parents' wedding. He looked like he'd just solved every problem that had ever existed in one enormous epiphany.

"Um ... what?" said Harry uncertainly.

"Death isn't real," said Sirius, still grinning hugely.

What. What? What the - "What?"

"You _talked _to James and Lily," explained Sirius gleefully. "They weren't just figments of your imagination, you got information from spirit-Dumbledore that you _didn't have_ before you talked to him! That means they're still alive, they still _exist_! They're just - not here, I guess - but they're not _gone_. Death isn't real."

Now it was Harry's turn to stare at Sirius, somewhat thunderstruck.

Sirius sudenly started talking very rapidly, excitedly, gesturing expansively. "That doesn't mean we should just let people die, of course, dying is painful and sucks and separates you from people you love," he said first, correctly guessing Harry's immediate concern. "I'm not going to commit suicide or anything, there's _you_ and there's things to be _done!_ We can fix most of the stuff you told me about, probably, a lot of the shitty things that happened to you were bad coincidences or things you just weren't ready for. I mean, you had absolutely no reason to expect most of them, of course, that's not your fault, but now you know! And we've got years of lead time, we can get all sorts of things done in six years, we could hunt down all the Horcruxes ahead of time, we could systematically take out all the Death Eaters, we could grab your favorite friends and teach them to duel - "

He babbled on like this for some time, talking about guerilla strategy and hiding from wizarding view, and how to teach duelling - apparently he'd taught Matt Savage to duel when they were both in school, which Harry hadn't known. He had enthusiastic opinions about how the house in Godric's Hollow could be repaired if they could make it sufficiently safe, or what to do with a new house if they went elsewhere. Most of those appeared to be based on having fairly nuanced recollection of Lily's aesthetic preferences; since 'learning Lily's aesthetics' consisted mostly of being yelled at (he admitted with a sheepish grin), this was a flavor of memories that he had retained better than most. He had ideas about specific and appropriate ways to annoy and/or assassinate various former Death Eaters and their allies, amusing pranks to pull on annoying-but-not-actually-evil members of the Ministry of Magic. He went on for awhile trying to determine how best to approach Moony, and also the Tonkses, who were his only non-terrible relatives with the occasional exception of Narcissa Malfoy.

Harry mostly listened, and watched with fascination. The Sirius he had known had been broken, had been _shattered _by the deaths of the Potters. He had never recovered, he probably never _would _have recovered completely from the loss of the people around whom his life revolved. Even in his brighter moments, he had so clearly been trying desperately to chase away the unignorable, crushing weight of despair. Even seemingly cheery, he had always been faintly insincere, trying to pretend not to be the broken shell of his former self that everyone knew he was. But this Sirius had just learned that the people for whom he grieved were safely ensconced in the afterlife, that once he was done here he would get to see them again.

This - this was Sirius _happy_.

Once he'd started winding down, Harry said, "So, where the hell are we, anyway?"

Sirius blinked and gave him a puzzled look. "_You_ brought us here."

"What? No I didn't. I was aiming for the Forest of Dean," objected Harry. That was decidedly _not _where they were.

"Um ... _I _was aiming for Godric's Hollow," said Sirius. This was also decidedly not where they were.

They stared at each other for a moment, shaken.

"We are _absurdly_ lucky," observed Harry somewhat distantly. Those two things were not near one another. Given that neither one of them had apparently managed to have a strong enough pull to actually get where they were _planning _to go, they should have been splinched halfway. By all rights the two of them should have ended up scattered across five counties in bloody bits, and thereby lost any chance they might have had at positively influencing the direction of the next twenty years of wizarding Britain's history. Instead, they were merely lost; and _lost _was barely even an inconvenience when you could Apparate.

They decided after some deliberation that they would not tell anyone else about Harry being mysteriously from the future. For information safety reasons this meant they probably needed not to visibly interact with the magical world until Harry turned eleven and went to Hogwarts, even if they managed improbably to convince the world that Sirius was not a mass murderer and Harry had not been kidnapped. Getting hold of Wormtail and murdering him with great prejudice and/or throwing him at MLE covered in Anti-Animagus Jinxes was high on their priority list, but slightly higher was making sure that they didn't get arrested quicker than that.

For the very immediate present, Sirius Conjured a mirror and they spent a probably-absurd amount of time Transfiguring each other such that they were unrecognizable as themselves but also not disfigured or strange-looking in a way that would draw attention. Sirius Disillusioned Harry, and then Harry hopped very briefly to the Dursleys' house and, ignoring the total freakout that was still taking place, stole all the available money and jewelry in the house. Vernon made plenty of money, and they deserved the slight inconvenience, Harry reasoned, although he honestly still felt a bit guilty about it. He'd probably pay them back, secretly, once he had access to his Gringotts account or some other source of funds.

Sirius took the jewelry, vanished for half an hour, and returned with the equivalent in Muggle money.

Harry, who had been expecting this to take longer and was in the midst of trying to figure out how to break into Dumbledore's office for his vault key and the Invisibility Cloak, startled when his godfather reappeared. "That was fast," he said. "Should I be concerned that you are unusually good at fencing stolen jewelry?"

This provoked a slightly embarrassed smirk. "I vaaaaguely recall being lectured for my tendency to break into Death Eaters' houses and steal things from them," said Sirius, shrugging a little helplessly. "I don't think Lily actually minded, she just felt sort of obligated to be the voice of reason? But being yelled at was still not super pleasant, so." Sirius looked down at the stack of Muggle bills he'd just handed Harry. "I _don't _know why I know how to do that for Muggle money instead of for wizarding money. But it feels loosely correlated in my head with Prongs, so maybe he really liked Muggle music or something." Sirius had started referring to James in the present tense, briefly, before Harry had pointed out that this would be _extremely _conspicuous in conversation and cause people to think he might be crazy. So he'd stopped again, but he was still basically acting as if James and Lily - and for that matter Regulus, the Prewett twins, Marlene McKinnon, etc - were, rather than being _dead_, merely some inconvenient distance away. He _was _a bit frustrated with the giant gaping holes in his memory, but as Harry had theorized that it probably wasn't permanent, this didn't seem to be denting his enthusiasm much. "Anyway, apparently I have this skill and I will probably eventually figure out why!" he said brightly.

"I see," said Harry, bemused. He was still adjusting to Sirius being so ... well ... not serious. "So we have lots of Muggle money and no wizarding money. This suggests an obvious starting plan of pretending to be Muggles and avoiding the wizarding world that way?" Pause. "Oooh, I am _deeply_ tempted to locate Hermione and try to buy a house in friendly-neighbor distance." Then he could go be friendly on the pretext of introducing himself to the new neighbors, try to seem precocious-but-not-too-adult, and make friends with Hermione on the basis that she was brighter than anyone else of their age. He didn't especially want to attend primary school, but they could say he was homeschooled, he'd be able to demonstrate basic competence in anything that the mundane social services might plausibly expect a primary schooler to be able to do. And then in six years when Hermione got her Hogwarts letter she would be _pleasantly surprised _to find that her friend down the street was also magical and would be going to Hogwarts as well.

Hopefully. Maybe.

"I don't think this is enough money to buy a house," said Sirius. It _was _a lot of money, but not _that _much money.

"We _could _just go on stealing things, I guess," said Harry. He wasn't extremely sanguine about the idea, being as he was technically a police officer, and he _had _taken a 'protect and serve' oath at some point, but so long as they confined their crime to people who genuinely deserved it he supposed he'd probably live. He'd much rather just find a way to get into his vault; or Sirius', for that matter. "But it'll look suspicious to Muggles, and so will mysteriously having money even if we're getting it from our own vaults instead of someone else's and can't explain why. Is there any non-magical job that you could plausibly pretend to have the relevant credentials for?"

Sirius considered that question thoughtfully. "Uuuuhm," he said after a moment, "are we talking about pretending well enough to actually convince someone to hire me, or pretending well enough to give a convincing answer when the neighbors ask 'so what do you do for a living'?"

"Second thing," answered Harry, "there's going to be _way_ better things for you to be doing than working a Muggle job, none of which will require you to retrain your draw twitch." The phrase 'draw twitch' occurred intermittently in the Auror Office, and described the tendency of anyone who spent too much time in combat to respond to sudden noises by pointing wands at them, even if doing so required drawing the wand from a sleeve or pocket in the process. He knew perfectly well Sirius, far too little removed from warfare, would experience this precise problem, and that would be _conspicuous _if he spent large contiguous periods of time interacting with Muggles. He wouldn't look dangerous, pointing sticks at people if they startled him, but he _would _look like he was crazy.

Nodding, Sirius said, "The obvious failure point of almost anything I pick is that it will probably be obvious I'm lying if I happen to run into someone who actually _does _do whatever I'm claiming, though. I mean, it'll be all 'oh where do you work?' and 'do you have an opinion on this complex internal issue that no one outside our field knows about?' and I'm not _that _good at making things up."

This was a good point. "Well, don't say you're a dentist, that's what Hermione's parents do," sighed Harry. "We'll table that one for a minute here. How much do you know about building defensive wards? We're going to have to start from scratch if we buy a totally nonmagical house ... "

They were still discussing this when they eventually realized they needed food and somewhere to sleep. So they altered their Transfiguration-based disguises slightly such that they looked convincingly related, and picked a random city by drawing a crude sketch of the Isles in the dirt and throwing rocks at it. Then Sirius - with a fake Conjured ID that named him _Evan Michaelson_ - rented a perfectly ordinary non-magical hotel room, and they ordered room service and resumed their plotting with barely a hitch.

Harry was starting to feel like this might actually not be a total disaster.


	6. Why Did We Think This Would Work

The day Harry had left the Dursleys and broken Sirius out of Azkaban turned out, upon investigation, to have been June 22nd of 1986, which was, interestingly, _exactly_ twenty years earlier than the day Harry remembered it being when he'd fallen asleep an adult. Muggle newspapers were showing pictures of both of them, respectively as The Very Dangerous And Probably Armed Escaped Criminal and The Kid He Kidnapped. The articles didn't mention Harry by name and were very vague about where Sirius might have escaped _from_, but this did mean that the Ministry thought Sirius' escape warranted warning the Muggle government about him. It also meant that the Ministry, and possibly also Dumbledore, had concluded that Sirius had indeed kidnapped Harry. That was ... not _good_ ... but also not surprising. They didn't plan to devote much worry to it.

Five days (and a substantial dent in their finite stolen funds) later, Harry and Sirius had the following plan outlined and agreed upon:

(1) Design disguises that they could live with semipermanently, which would make them look (a) unrecognizable and (b) obviously related.

(2) Visit the _Rue des Merveilles _- the Parisian counterpart to Diagon Alley - to change money to Galleons and buy an owl.

(3) Buy new wands from Gregorovitch, who was considerably less likely to report them to the DMLE than Ollivander.

(4) Mail-order money from Sirius' Gringotts account (not Harry's - Dumbledore might notice) in mostly, but not entirely, Muggle denominations.

(5) Set up a Muggle bank account.

(6) Buy a house as conveniently near the Grangers as possible.

(6) Befriend Hermione's family. Claim Harry is Sirius' (homeschooled) son, invent dead wife to occasionally be obviously sad about.

(7) Design and implement a sufficiently powerful defense schema to keep out hostile wizards.

(8) Break into Hogwarts via Honeydukes and steal Harry's vault key and invisibility cloak from Dumbledore.

(9) Start hunting Horcruxes.

It seemed like a good plan. They agreed that it was a good plan. They were confident in their ability to carry out all of the steps up to (8), which was going to be quite difficult. (7) would be time-consuming and exhausting, but Sirius had a rather large body of experience with it for his age; he'd gone to a rather large amount of effort, when he was seventeen, to adequately protect the flat he was living in from abrupt and violent assault by his relatives. So they figured that would be fine, and all the steps before that would be even easier.

Harry should probably not have been surprised that they ran into complications no later than step (2).

* * *

><p>They spent a little bit of time wandering around on the magical marble that paved Paris' glittery center of magical commerce, in their search for a store that might conceivably sell them a post owl. Harry wanted Hedwig, but of course Hedwig had probably not yet been born, and in any case it wouldn't be a particularly good idea to go to Diagon Alley even in non-Polyjuice disguise. (The Transfiguration-based disguise was equally difficult to detect, less temporary, and easier to dispel quickly. This was balanced by its being much more difficult and time-consuming to create, but they considered this an acceptable trade-off.) It had not been long enough since Sirius' escape and Harry's disappearance; people would be on the lookout for anything suspicuous. Their hunt, however, was interrupted by the sound of an extremely high-pitched shriek, several startled exclamations, and a tiny platinum-blonde figure dashing very quickly through the crowd, directly at Harry.<p>

Harry only very narrowly didn't draw a wand on her. He _did _take several very rapid steps back, eyes wide.

"Hé là!" she said very brightly, skidding to a startlingly graceful stop roughly where he had just been standing. Sirius gave her a dubious, suspicious look. She was perhaps nine or ten, wore a cheery yellow sundress, and had her long silvery-blonde hair in an elegant braid that Harry was almost certain would have required a professional hairdresser to successfully create. She did not look _exactly_ like Gabrielle Delacour had looked the first time Harry met her, because Gabrielle had been dressed for winter, wearing her hair down, and _drenched_, but -

" ... bonjour?" said Harry, confused and wrong-footed.

"You smell like birds," said the girl that Harry was almost entirely sure was Fleur, in French which was thankfully clear enough for him to understand. Hermione spoke fluent French and had a general policy of not acting as translator unless it was _important_, so he'd sort of been forced to learn the language from interaction with his counterparts in the French National Security office.

Harry stared at her. "I ... smell like birds?" he repeated, confused.

Apolline Delacour caught up to her daughter, managing to simultaneously look exhausted, frustrated, and completely radiant. Such were the magical powers of half-Veela, Harry supposed absently. "I am terribly sorry - " she began, giving Fleur a chastising look.

"Maman! You said there was no such thing as boy Veela!"

Sirius failed, badly, to suppress a snicker. Apolline turned a fascinating shade of pink, which distracted Sirius slightly; after a second he shook his head violently and deliberately looked away, which made Apolline shoot him a look of _deep_ gratitude. "Fleur, dearest," she began patiently, "there _are _no ... such ... you _do_ smell like birds," she said thoughtfully, turning her gaze on Harry.

"Um," said Harry. Okay, this was new. He knew that Veela were, as a species, related to birds, in a vaguely similar way to how centaurs were related to horses or merfolk were related to fish and/or alligators. Birds, he knew, had a relatively sharp sense of smell compared to humans, although nothing compared to dogs. Fleur had never in the future commented on his smell, but come to think of it, when they'd gleefully shown up for family dinner night just after their successful Animagus transformation and challenged everyone to bet on what they were, the quarter-Veela witch _had_ been the one who correctly guessed that they were both birds of prey. So ... Veela could identify avian Animagi by scent, although maybe not others; neither had commented on Sirius yet. This wasn't totally shocking, given that Crookshanks had demonstrated a similar ability and it was probably not unique.

Not, it seemed, clearly enough to know precisely what they were detecting, however, which might be the only thing that was going to save Harry here. Fleur had jumped to the conclusion that he was of Veela descent, which suggested that this ability was not precise enough to be able to tell the difference between 'sometimes a bird due to deliberate magic' and 'sometimes a bird due to ancestry.' Harry glanced at Sirius, puzzled. _Should _he claim to be of Veela descent? It wouldn't be _totally_ out of the question; the disguises they'd settled on, in addition to being unrecognizable as similar to either of their natural states, had relatively dark skin for Veela, and uninteresting brown eyes ... but they _did _have blond hair. Plus, it wasn't like Harry could safely explain the phenomenon by _demonstrating _that he was a falcon Animagus. Not only was it wildly illlegal, since he was underage as well as unregistered, doing so would strip his Transfiguration and return him to his darker, green-eyed, conspicuously-forehead-scarred natural form, which had been all over the newspapers recently. _  
><em>

And then they would be in _all of the trouble_.

So.

"Um ... is that weird?" said Harry, aiming for innocent ignorance.

Fleur looked like she wanted desperately to babble excitedly but was concerned that this would cause her mother to lose interest in the fascinating problem in favor of shushing her. "Frankly, yes," said Apolline, giving Harry - and Sirius - a searching look. "May I buy you coffee? I believe my daughter will sulk for the next year and a half if I don't interrogate you about your ancestry. I don't want to pry, of course, but - "

Harry's desire to be sensible and cautious and run far, far away from the curious Veela with their too-sharp noses clashed immediately and violently with his desire to befriend the girl who would be both his friend and his sister-in-law. If they only visited occasionally, wrote friendly letters, and didn't do anything suspicious, surely everything would be fine. There was no plausible motive for an evil Sirius Black to randomly decide to let a kidnapped Harry Potter befriend the daughter of Monsieur Franz Delacour, who was currently the director of emergency services at EHP, the French magical hospital, and would only much later become French Minister for Magic. Surely no one would be suspicuous ... (this was just a rationalization, Harry suspected, but, well, his _entire life _consisted almost entirely of things going much worse than expected and at this point trying to avoid it seemed fruitless). He summoned his limited acting skills and said, as high-pitched and childish as he could manage, "Dad, dad, can we please?"

Sirius gave him a somewhat startled look. "Uh ... yeah, okay, sure," he said.

Thus it was that they found themselves sitting with nine-year-old Fleur Delacour and her mother in a cute little Parisian café, with coffee for the adults and hot chocolate for the kids. And shortly after ordering drinks they were surrounded by the gentle whooshing of a private conversation charm Apolline had produced by rearranging her hairdo (on closer inspection, the two elaborately carved wooden sticks holding her bun together were, in fact, wands). Which, Harry had to admit, was not by far the _worst _weird thing that could have happened, but ... it was still pretty weird. "So," said Sirius, who looked actually _more _confused, possibly because he'd never actually met Fleur and had no idea why Harry was going along with this, "may I ask who I am speaking to?"

This was the point at which it occurred to Harry that the two part-Veela had not actually introduced themselves, and he frantically went back over the brief conversation in the street in his head, afraid that he might have accidentally addressed either or both by name. Thankfully he hadn't, since the brief walk to the suggested café had consisted mostly of confused silence, Sirius and Apolline exchanging vaguely suspicious looks, and Fleur skipping in circles making a sound which strongly resembled a very excited teakettle.

Fleur's mother smiled apologetically. "Apolline Delacour," she introduced herself, holding out a hand. "This is my daughter, Fleur. My husband Franz is home with our baby, Gabrielle." Gabrielle was, in Harry's memory, a bright young witch just out of school, with a werewolf girlfriend, a fondness for impassioned speeches, and a rapidly developing civil rights movement. She had, apparently, just been born. That was ... _weird_ was probably the best word for it, even if it felt sort of inadequate. Not quite on par with the extremely strange sensation of realizing that he had babysat this nine-year-old girl's future daughter, but still. "The reason we are having this conversation is that my mother was a Veela. We smell distinctively of our avian ancestry, and so does your - son?"

"Michael Murphy," Sirius introduced himself in return without hesitation, shaking politely. They'd decided that using names totally different from their own, and thereby unlikely to arouse suspicion, was worth the slight inconvenience of having to keep track of them. Names that started with similar vocal sounds would help avoid slips (if you accidentally started to say 'Harry' and he was supposed to be 'Henry', that was less conspicuous) and names they had some claim to (e.g. Evans) and permutations thereof (Gray or Green instead of Black, Porter instead of Potter, etc) would be considerably easier to remember, identify with, and crucially, respond normally to. But these things were all, together, not enough compared to avoiding suspicion as effectively as possible. "This is Adrian, he is my son, yes. We lost his mother several years ago to dragon pox." The fictional dead woman, whose name was Evelyn, would be said to have died of thyroid cancerwhen the story was told to Muggles, but wizards didn't actually get cancer. _  
><em>

"Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss," said Apolline sympathetically. This information seemed, unsurprisingly, to make her considerably more reluctant to ask the obvious next question, but given Fleur's bouncing excitement she sighed, and said, "I don't suppose you know whether she had Veela ancestry?"

Claiming to have gotten it from Sirius would be unconvincing, since Sirius apparently did not have the distinctive scent. "I bet she did," said Harry brightly, "she was really pretty."

"We're all really pretty!" said Fleur gleefully. "That's how you can tell!"

Harry had to try to forcibly ignore his sense that the younger version of Fleur was implausibly enthusiastic. She'd been much quieter and more restrained as an adult, but that didn't _necessarily_ mean she'd experienced some sort of personality-altering trauma, it just meant she'd grown up a bit. He told himself pointedly that adult Fleur _wasn't _actually very good at keeping her opinions to herself and that a difference in tone delivery did not actually represent a huge personality shift. It was only sort of working; part of his brain was distracted from the conversation at hand by trying to figure out what might have happened to damp Fleur's cheery demeanour so dramatically, and whether he could prevent it from happening to her. He was going to do the same thing for Ginny, if he could manage it; just because _he _was madly in love with the Ginny who'd been horribly traumatized didn't mean _she _deserved it. By the same token, just because he liked the quieter, more mature version of Fleur _better _didn't mean she deserved to have some unspecified awful thing happen to her.

He really hoped he was just being paranoid. He _was _kind of prone to that.

Sirius, thankfully, took Harry's interjection as the cue it was, and said, "Yes, I believe so. She didn't like to talk about it, and so I did not pry. I had the impression the gene only passed to female children?" he glanced curiously at Harry - the question _what are you plotting _clear in his false brown eyes - and then added, "So it'd never really occurred to me that it might be something that I needed to be concerned about."

"I see," said Apolline. "Fleur, I apologize, it seems I have told you incorrectly." She frowned curiously at Harry. "You don't _look_ especially Veela," she said, "you look like your father."

"Mum was blonde too," said Harry. "Blonder than me, though."

"Like us!" said Fleur. "We're probably cousins!" She looked terribly pleased about the idea. Fleur, Harry gathered, had always had trouble making friends due to the supernatural influence of her genetics, which was why she was so close to her sister. He'd once asked her what it was like to put a bunch of Veela in a room, at family gatherings or whatever, and she'd explained that she didn't really know. Veela marrying humans and marrying into wizarding society was rare, and the rest generally declined to associate with the ones that chose to do so. Her mother had had no siblings, so she had only her grandmother, her mother, her sister, and then her father's human family. So Harry could see why Fleur would be excited to have found more. _  
><em>

"Ah," said Apolline, "probably not, dear, they aren't even - you're not French, are you, monsieur Murphy?"

"Our accents give us away, I'm sure," sighed Sirius theatrically. He also had fluent French, and as his childhood lessons in French (and Latin) were punctuated at frequent intervals by his mother yelling, he'd retained almost all of them, so he wasn't having trouble carrying the conversation, but of course he and Harry both had noticeable British accents. "No, we're not, we're English. I suppose we would have to be related at some arbitrary distance, though," he added, amused. "Everyone is related if you go far back enough."

Fleur looked _utterly delighted _by this, which made Apolline smile. "I suppose that's true," she admitted.

By the time they'd finished their coffee and hot chocolate, Fleur had extracted a promise that "Adrian" write to her using his soon-to-be-acquired post owl, and that they maybe visit sometime, because Family! Kind of!, and Sirius had managed to demonstrate such an impressive resistance to Apolline's undampable Veela aura that she actually commented on it. As much as this did for the verisimilitude of their accidentally modified cover story, since Sirius was able to brush it off cheerfully by pointing out that he'd totally been married to a part-Veela and so was used to the aura, Harry suspected that the actual reason was closer to something really depressing like 'losing James and Lily completely broke Sirius'. He decided it was probably best not to ask, even after they had bid the Delacours good day and headed off to continue their interrupted quest. Harry did not especially want to be treated to an extended soliloquy on Lily's totally unrivalled intensity of emotion; as amusing as it was to listen to Sirius wax poetic about his parents, Harry generally preferred not to think too hard about exactly _why_ his godfather was that particular kind of attached to them.

They walked in silence, mostly; it would have been too easy to say something suspicious.

Sirius hummed to himself; Harry ended up burning most of the time indulging in a daydream about setting up Ron and Hermione fast enough to avert the Yule Ball disaster. Unlikely, but a pleasant thought.


	7. Why Do We Even Bother Making Plans

They had to sit in the little Parisian café for a little while after the Delacours had left, staring at each other in confused silence.

Eventually Sirius said, "So, that happened?"

And Harry said, "Wow, it _did_," and broke down in helpless giggles. It wasn't likely to come up terribly often, since there would be no point claiming Veela ancestry unless someone actually asked and he needed to use the excuse. But still: Fleur Delacour was now totally convinced that an imaginary person called Adrian Murphy was her distant relative on her mother's sider. That was a totally ridiculous achievement and Harry was going to need to take a second to be proud of himself for it. The trick now, though, was just going to be making friends well _enough_ that when she came to Hogwarts eight years from now, he'd be able to admit that he was actually Harry Potter - because she'd be able to tell by scent - and have her not immediately turn him into the DMLE for being an illegal Animagus. _  
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Fleur was a decent person. Harry was optimistic.

They'd already changed money, Gringotts Paris being just as large and easy to find as the London one, but an owlery was slightly harder to locate, since neither of them had actually been here before. Eventually they did find it, however, and wandered around for a long time, fascinated. Just as there were magical rats who could turn into top hats to which Ron had been unfavorably comparing Scabbers (which, in retrospect, was very funny, when Harry imagined how _Wormtail_ felt about it), there also existed a great many species of magical owl. Britain was better known for its broomsticks and its clever potioneers, which was why most of the magical beasts Harry had seen in passing had been imported. Magical France, however, had several native species of magical owl, and _La volière Chanteciel _was full of them, carefully labeled and with helpful pamplets on their best care.

On consideration, he suspected that Hedwig - so clever - was a Swedish Hooting Owl, so named because they were most easily told apart from the Muggle sort of snowy owl by their distinctive hoot. They were supposed to be especially loyal, prone to be prideful and very good at guessing what you wanted. The shopkeeper saw Harry staring at his collection of them and gave him the whole spiel, but Harry (wincing) said he really didn't need to buy an owl right now, thanks. Sirius, to Harry's eternal gratitude, noticed his discomfort and said something cheery to the effect that he'd buy his son an owl for his eleventh birthday but right _now _he wanted something more like _that_, and pulled the man away to tell him about Ethiopian Poison Shrikes.

They spent nearly an hour wandering around the store making vaguely dissatisfied faces at each other and trying to make a decision, and then they were introduced to a dark red owl approximately the size of an eagle.

A _large _eagle.

It noticed them looking, rearranged itself carefully on its perch, spread its wings, and burst dramatically into flame. Several different colors of flame, red and blue and purple, danced along its flight feathers and reflected in its eyes, and when it flapped, they threw incandescent color in all directions. Which _completely_ explained why this particular bird was on its own perch separate from the others, and contained in an entirely metal cage devoid of flammable objects. That was horribly dangerous and no one should ever be allowed to own it, Harry thought. It was horribly unsafe and someone would get set on fire. And _also _it was way too expensive, it was nearly as much as a brand-new broomstick. It wasn't like they couldn't _afford _ridiculous things like this but it was, in fact, _totally __ridiculous,_ and completely unnecessary, and conspicuous, and dangerous, and -

"I want it," he said.

"Me too," said Sirius, who appeared to have followed a roughly similar train of thought. "Can we name it Lily?"

"We are not naming it Lily," said Harry immediately, definitively. He _liked _that idea, but they were trying to be responsible about secrecy, here.

"Damn," said Sirius, not sounding terribly surprised. "What about Miner - wait, hang on, _is _it a girl owl?" It said something about the kind of people that either of them spent any time with, thought Harry with a jolt of amused realization, that he and Sirius had both looked at _terrifying amounts of fire _and automatically assigned it a female gender. They hadn't actually asked, and the creature wasn't labeled. Harry kind of hoped the answer was _yes;_ naming an owl _Minerva _did not imply anything about them except that they either really liked old Roman myths, or they had been Gryffindors in school, so that would actually be okay.

"It, um, it is not," said the shopkeeper, looking slightly unnerved.

"Damn," said Sirius again. "How about _Rex_?"

Harry considered that thoughtfully. Just barely a reference to Regulus, being a permutation on the name, but plausibly just a descriptor of the owl's kingly bearing. Sirius said he'd stopped actually calling his brother that when he was twelve, so the odds that anyone would even _recognize _it as a nickname for the entirely deceased Regulus Black were relatively low. It _did _seem worth doing, offering some small token of appreciation for all the unrecognized good that Regulus had done. And it was actually a pretty good name for an owl. "Yeah, okay," he said.

"So ... you would like the Ignatius Owl," said the shopkeeper, in a fairly transparent attempt to refocus their attention on him.

"No, we just thought we'd name it for fun," said Harry dryly, as Sirius snickered and started counting out Galleons.

* * *

><p>They decided to do step (4) before step (3), and took a pause in a different cute café (there were, apparently, a number of them), for Sirius to write out a mail-order to Gringotts London, with enclosed blood sample. He explained that his family had not actually used vault keys, because they were paranoid and vault keys could theoretically be stolen. "It's one of the few things I actually didn't disagree with my father about, I think," Sirius said cheerfully. "Probably because it wasn't his idea. I think it was my grandfather's idea, he was actually sort of reasonable sometimes." Harry, who had always sort of vaguely assumed that Sirius must have somehow stolen or otherwise recovered his own vault key sometime during 1993, felt as though he now much better understood how his godfather had managed to buy him a Firebolt via Kneazle-order.<p>

Once Rex (looking smug and slightly incandescent) had winged off in the general direction of the Channel, they wandered back out onto the marble streets to locate the Portkey hub which would, for a fee, send you to most other centers of magical commerce. London, Shanghai, Sydney, Chicago, St. Petersburg, Cairo, etc. It would, in theory, take them to Munich and thence to the home of Ivan Gregorovitch, wandmaker.

_That _part went fine.

Less fine: Walking through the door to Gregorovitch's dusty wand shop (were _all_ wand shops permanently dusty?) and finding themselves abruptly divested of their carefully designed Transfigured disguises. The little boy currently trying out a wand gasped audibly, and said a flood of excited, high-pitched Polish words to his mother. The only recognizable words involved were, naturally, _Harry Potter!_.

Of course he was internationally famous. He'd been dramatically kidnapped by a famous mass murderer _after _already being famously the defeater of the worst Dark Lord since Gellert Grindelwald. And ... "Of _fucking course_ you've got Thief's Downfall," grumbled Harry, glaring at the wandmaker, who was snickering audibly. "I cannot imagine why I thought _you _of all people wouldn't." This was the man who had owned the Elder Wand until it had been _stolen._ Of course he had paranoid security on part with the goblins themselves. He had had more than half a century to design adequately paranoid systems, to the point that he apparently didn't even need to actually douse them with magical water. They only had to walk in the door.

The woman said something to her son that sounded like a caution or a warning, and then turned to run out the door, pulling him by the hand.

Sirius Stunned them.

"Thank you, Sirius," said Harry, rubbing his temples. "I'm sure that wasn't illegal or anything."

"Highly illegal," said Gregorovitch, smirking. With a wave of his hand, the doors shut and locked, and the windows turned an opaque shade of blue. His German accent was barely detectable. "But why should he care? There is nothing _worse_they can do than put him back in Azkaban."

"Well, they could kill me," offered Harry.

"Nah," said Sirius. "They couldn't."

Perhaps wisely, the wandmaker chose not to question this assertion. He simply ignored it and moved on to the relevant part of the conversation. "Unless you have a grudge against that little Polish boy, I assume you are here to purchase a wand, Mr. Black?"

"Two wands," said Sirius, nodding at Harry.

"That is also illegal," observed Gregorovitch, amused. "But no more illegal than selling to a wanted criminal, after all. I will sell you two wands, Mr. Black, if you modify the memories of my customers who saw you here." He nodded at the unconscious people on the ground. "At a slight increase on the standard price, of course, for the trouble."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Of course."

Sirius was trying to decide between several flavors of oak and Harry had just picked up a wand he thought he rather liked, when four Aurors in combat reds materialized with a rattling _krakakooom,_ the sound characteristic of extremely long-distance Apparition. They were all in contact with one another, because you couldn't do that under your own power, you had to combine effort, and even then, everyone involved had to be _good_. Which also meant they were not only now faced with Matt Savage, who was probably the most dangerous person currently employed by the Auror Office, and who was _probably_ not holding onto thin air but rather his Disillusioned friend John Proudfoot, but also the newly-minted Chief Auror. Rufus Scrimgeour had replaced Amelia Bones when she was promoted to DMLE Director, or at least Harry thought he had; it was possible that hadn't happened yet, he hadn't actually been paying attention. And the fourth person, a slim Indian witch with sharp blood-red eyes and spiky dark hair, could only be Scrimgeour's field partner Devi Redwood, who Harry had never met because she'd died before he ever met Scrimgeour.

Aurors only ever had one assigned combat partner, Harry had learned. You didn't often see them not in pairs because they usually died together, but even when they didn't, it was department policy not to try to replace them for people. That just got newbies killed by senior Aurors forgetting they didn't know what they were doing, or for that matter killed by senior Aurors who were angry at them for not being precise replacements of the people they'd lost, to whom they were usually as close as brothers and sisters. Someone had explained this to Harry by asking him to try to imagine replacing Ron with, oh, say, Dennis Creevey. Finding out that Rufus Scrimgeour had lost his Ron-equivalent barely a year into his Auror career had given Harry a lot of much-needed perspective on how the man had ended up who he was.

It did not, however, give him a great deal of sympathy, at this precise moment, for the person who was responsible for pushing his day even further off the rails.

"_Protego maximus,_" snapped Harry, spinning the rowan-and-phoenix-feather wand currently in his hand through the motions of the great-shield with barely a flicker of hesitation. It behaved admirably, and he decided absently that he was going to buy it. This wasn't a perfect replacement for his beloved holly wand, but he was going to have to _steal_ that one if he wanted it before he was eleven, and he was afraid that might upset it. And this was better than Proudfoot's wand, which was still hidden up his sleeve. At any rate - "For fuck's sake," he said, glaring at the Aurors who were now giving him confused, slightly alarmed looks. Proudfoot's Disillusionment, powerful though it was, was already bleeding away under the influence of Gregorovitch's security charms, which revealed that he was tapping curiously on the blue dome that Harry had just summoned into existence, covering himself, Sirius, and Gregorovitch (who looked mildly surprised). It would take them some time to break that, especially since Harry was quietly pressing more complicated protection spells into it even as he looked at them. Seriously, it had been _ten minutes _and they were in _Germany._ "How did you do that?"

"We're not _complete _idiots," said Savage irritably. "You broke a murderer out of _Azkaban,_ we're not just going to report it to the _Daily Prophet _and then sit on our asses saying _oh, darn, he got away._ We've been monitoring this place, Ollivanders', all of Hogsmeade, and his last several known addresses, among other things which I'm not going to tell you because _again_, we are not _stupid,_ around the clock, we've got a different four-man team for the night shift, you're goddamn lucky Mad-Eye's asleep right now. Who the hell are you, anyway? And what have you done with the Boy-Who-Lived? I know he's not dead, if you're still using him for Polyjuice." _  
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"Okay, first of all," said Harry, blinking, "good job, seriously, I genuinely did not think the Auror Office was this competent without Director Bones in it."

"Oh, thanks so much," drawled Redwood, drawing spiky red runes on Harry's shield and making an annoyed face when they disrupted into sparks rather than breaking the shield. Harry smirked in her general direction. In the absence of Unforgivables, magical combat was a decided win for the defense. Shields were just _more powerful_ than offensive spells, if you used them correctly. You could only ever win on the offense by being dramatically more powerful than your opponent, or knowing something they didn't. There were only four of them versus two, Sirius having started throwing up more layers under Harry's shield as soon as he was done counting out twenty Galleons for Gregorovitch (cost of two seven-Galleon wands, plus a surcharge for Suddenly Aurors). And Harry was, actually, reasonably good at this particular task. He'd discovered sometime during Auror training that his shields were actually pretty good if he put the effort into holding them, because of the sheer number of people who had tried to murder him over the course of his life.

And, yes, he was going to be insufferably smug about it.

"That's not going to work," Harry said cheerfully. Redwood, to her credit, ignored him. This was a time-consuming task even at the best of times, which was why it had taken entire minutes for them to shatter the shield Harry had put on the door to Azkaban even when he _wasn't _there to keep reinforcing it. Unfortunately, it was also really difficult to Apparate out from under a shield you were maintaining, which was why they were still here, while Proudfoot stalked around the edge of the dome and started methodically bombarding it with breaker hexes. Harry was sort of vaguely hoping that Sirius would figure something out, because he wasn't actually sure what he was going to do. He didn't know how the Aurors had found them and didn't feel particularly sanguine about the idea of running away without knowing whether they'd be followed. "Anyway, second thing, you realize that Thief's Downfall strips Polyjuice, right?"

There was a pause, during which Savage and Scrimgeour exchanged dubious frowns.

"So, to answer the question, I am in fact the Boy-Who-Lived. Can you tell Dumbledore I'm not dead, please? I don't think he'd believe me if I wrote him a letter."

"No, probably not," said Scrimgeour, now giving him an intent, fascinated look. It made him look much more familiar, much less like a bizarrely young version of the iron lion Harry had briefly known. Rufus Scrimgeour had been a Gryffindor, Harry knew, but a very quiet one, rather more like stern Minerva McGonagall than like outrageously glittery Albus Dumbledore. Scrimgeour asked, without turning his head from staring at Harry, "Matt, you think he's been Imperiused?"

"I can't think of a _better _explanation," gritted Savage. He was bouncing up and down on his toes, a caricature of badly-contained adrenaline. He glowed dark, dark red. "But I'd need to get closer to him to check. And kids don't just - you can't actually make people cast spells they _don't know_." He was fidgeting with what had to be a borrowed wand, because his own was in Sirius' jacket pocket. He changed the subject, looked at Gregorovitch. "Wandmaker, why didn't you report them?"

Gregorovitch gave him a look of deep disgust. "Because I prefer to not be _dead_?" he suggested darkly.

"Hey, we wouldn't actually have killed you," protested Sirius. "At worst you'd've spent a couple of hours Stunned and not remembered why."

"I can't imagine why you'd think I would actually believe that," said the wandmaker.

"Eh," shrugged Sirius. He had a point. "Hey Matt, what do I get if I give you your wand back?"

" ... you get slightly less violently hexed, I guess," said Savage, eyebrows rising. "You don't seriously think I wouldn't still arrest you? _You_ stole my wand."

"Technically, _I _stole your wand," corrected Harry brightly. "Sorry, I needed it." He really was sorry. The problem was, most of the Death Eaters were either legally exonerated or in jail, and until the next War started brewing - which Harry was planning to try to _prevent _if possible - the Aurors basically had nothing to do except try to find Sirius and 'rescue' Harry. So inconveniencing them was sort of necessary. But still, he didn't like it, and it wasn't like he and Sirius had any other reason they were likely to find themselves stripped of disguises. Although Harry couldn't actually think of any way the Aurors could have found them _just _because they suddenly looked like themselves again. Unless they had some kind of super-advanced scrying that had mysteriously stopped existing again by the time Harry started training, the only kinds of tracking they had were the stuff that got used for enforcing the underage magic laws, which was mostly magic heat maps and wand-tracking ... wait ...

Oh.

They'd been stupid.

No wonder the wandshops had been first on the Aurors' list of places to keep watch on.

"Sirius," said Harry, "how good are you at cursebreaking?"

"Uh, probably better than you, but not great?" hazarded Sirius.

Harry handed him the rowan wand he was holding. "I think these have Trace charms on them. Wouldn't be surprised if everything in the building does."

"Oh," said Sirius.

"I hate you," said Savage flatly. "Whoever the hell you are. Some arsehole with super Polyjuice or Black talking through Imperius or bloody You-Know-Who. I hate you."

"I," said Harry, grinning widely, "am Harry Potter. And I am _also_ not completely stupid."

"Yeah, they totally do," said Sirius, who had just done several detection charms and was not paying much attention to the conversation. "Gimme a minute."

"John, Devi, any progress?" asked Scrimgeour. Redwood shook her head and Proudfoot growled something profane, but neither had any progress to report. They were trying to use shieldbreaking magic that had gone obsolete decades before the shields Harry was using had even been invented. This, Harry reflected, was somewhat analogous to watching bomb disposal experts from the eighteen hundreds try to disarm a nuclear weapon. They were just missing some fundamental information and it wasn't going to work. Still, they kept trying. They were Aurors, after all.

"Sorry," Harry said, not quite managing to sound entirely sincere. He reinforced the shields again, just in case. "So, what'd you bribe Rita Skeeter with to keep her from blaming MLE for the breakout? I kept expecting to see a ridiculous overblown rant on misuse of government funding, and it was all just _please be vigilant _and _this is definitely not going to happen again we promise _and so on, I mean, good job, but _how_?" It probably _wasn't _going to happen again, mind. It was a good thing Harry didn't have any particular desire to break anyone _else _out of Azkaban, because they were probably going to be even more careful with their security from now on. Better alarms, more distance between the Apparition point and the door, that kind of thing. But Hermione had had to _lock her in a glass jar for several months _before Rita Skeeter had become even slightly cooperative; he was genuinely impressed that the Aurors had managed to avoid getting lambasted all over the _Daily Prophet_, given that Magical Britain apparently did not actually have any laws about libel.

Hermione's approach had frankly been kind of excessively cruel, particularly since unlike Hermione's treatment of Umbridge it had involved calm decision-making as opposed to _panicked improvisation,_ and Harry did not really think the Aurors were likely to have tried it.

"No comment," said Scrimgeour thinly.

Worth a shot.

Sirius said, "Hey, the traces on Matt and John's wands are way stronger, should I try - "

"Nah, don't bother," said Harry, "they can have them back, we're trying not to be totally awful here, and I'd rather not be here longer than we can avoid it."

"Alright," said Sirius amiably, and kept working.

There was an awkward silence, and then something else occurred to Harry.

"Hey, is Barty Crouch's wife dead yet?" he asked.

Everyone, even Sirius, gave him somewhat incredulous _wow that was really insensitive _looks.

" ... yes," said Savage, after a moment of visibly trying to think of any way Harry might plausibly weaponize this information. It wasn't like he couldn't just look it up, Althea Crouch's death would presumably be a matter of public record. It had just not occurred to him until just now. Still, Savage and Scrimgeour were both giving him suspicious looks. "Why?"

"Because that probably means his son is _not _dead and in fact is being kept under house arrest via Imperius," explained Harry.

"Sure," said Savage, rolling his eyes, "and Director Bones has Alicia Malfoy locked in her basement. We've been over this, I am not an idiot."

Harry blinked, and turned his head slightly to glance at Sirius, who was muttering to himself and pointing wands at each other. "Who's Alicia Malfoy?"

"Abraxas Malfoy's dead wife," supplied Sirius absently. "Jared Nott's twin sister. Died about two weeks before Narcissa's wedding, some kind of Mermish tuberculosis-like thing, she was all upset because it disturbed her seating arrangements slightly. I'm almost done, by the way."

"Right," said Harry, "yeah, that sounds like her. Okay, so no one's going to take me seriously apparently, that's cool, it's not like I'm the chosen one or anything, you can just assume I'm crazy, that's fine." He shrugged. "You have to buy me a drink if Crouch Junior kills his father because you weren't paying attention, Savage."

"Aaaand I'm done," said Sirius, grinning. He handed Harry the rowan wand he'd chosen, and spun his new red oak in his hand, looking smug. Proudfoot and Redwood between them produced half a dozen inventive swear words. "Count of three?"

"Three, two, _go,_" said Harry, who knew not to let the Aurors be ready to hex them. He dropped the shields on _two_, along with Proudfoot's wand, and on the count that should have been _one_, spun in a circle and Disapparated. Sirius, quick on the uptake, was just behind him.

In their wake would be left the sounds of angry Aurors snarling, hexes splintering shelves, and the gentle click of abandoned, tracking-charm-infested wands hitting the floor.


	8. Everything (Sort Of) According To Plan

They landed back in their hotel room, giggling like maniacs.

"That went well," said Sirius once he regained the ability to form coherent words. He was only mostly being sarcastic.

"Right?" beamed Harry. "I told you, I wasn't kidding, no matter how good my plans are, I always end up improvising anyway."

Sirius shrugged. "At least you're reasonably good at it. So! Where are we on our slightly mangled to-do list?"

There was a certain pause.

Harry said, "We probably should have _written down_ our to-do list, shouldn't we."

"Yyyyyeeeees possibly," said Sirius, with a rueful expression. He scrunched his eyes shut thoughtfully. "But then it could theoretically be stolen and then all our secret plans would be unsecret, so maybe not. Well, _first _we need to not look like ourselves, again." This was a reasonable suggestion; they were still conspicuously _Harry Potter and Sirius Black_, as opposed to Adrian and Michael Murphy. The process of putting disguises together again ate almost an hour - they were _hoping _it would become quicker with practice - and then they found themselves back at the same point.

The next thing on their to-do list, they concluded, was to set up a Muggle bank account for Sirius and buy a house, but they couldn't actually do the second thing until Rex returned with money from Gringotts. So they consulted maps and located a local branch of a nationwide bank. Sirius, who knew zero things about the _legal _side of Muggle finance, sounded obviously poorly informed and got a lot of somewhat pitying looks from the bank staff in the process of trying to set up an account. But he managed to sound like a poorly-educated Muggle rather than a wizard, which was all they really needed. And although the teller didn't seem terribly inclined to believe them, he did explain the proper process for depositing large amounts of money at once (which Sirius explained blithely was due to a family inheritance). And he offered to refer them to a real estate agent.

Once they returned the hotel, Sirius had a checkbook, a debit card, several business cards, a stack of totally uninformative Information Packets, and an expression of great confusion. "That was weird and complicated," grumbled Harry. He'd spent the whole time being quiet and trying not to act noticeably not-five. One of the tellers had complimented Sirius on his 'exceptionally well-behaved son' and Harry had had to try very hard not to burst out laughing. "I suddenly understand," he sighed, flopping onto a bed, "why even Hermione prefers goblin banking." Interacting with Gringotts was _exceptionally awkward _for him, Ron, and Hermione, and all three of them usually delegated to Ginny wherever possible, but he and Ron had no idea how to interact with the Muggle system, so they'd kept doing it. He was vaguely aware that Hermione had a Muggle bank account, but she seemed to really dislike using it, and he had always wondered about that until _just now_.

"Huh," said Sirius. "Yeah. Bright side, people rarely question you when you throw lots of money at them, so this whole house-buying thing will probably not be complicated as soon as we demonstrate to the bankers that we have lots of money to throw around." He threw away the useless information packets and pocketed the rest of the things. "Now what?"

"I think at this point we should probably start designing defenses," said Harry. That would take time, and they couldn't do much else until they had a permanent residence.

So, this they did.

Rex returned, smug and fiery, a few days later, by which time Sirius had absorbed everything Harry knew about the twenty-first-century state of the art in defensive magic and used it to design a ward system that would have made Alastor Moody proud. They went back to the Muggle bank and caused a slight disturbance when the tellers realized that Sirius' heavy backpack was filled entirely with hundred-dollar bills. Harry ended up having to surreptitiously Confound several dozen people to prevent them from calling the Muggle police on them. It looked, after all, entirely too much like Sirius must have done something wildly illegal, because you don't generally get hold of that much money all at once, in cash, _legally._ Sufficient application of magic caused them to accept the implausible 'it was an inheritance, ha ha elderly people and their distrust of technology' excuse eventually, however.

Buying a house was more complicated.

Especially since Harry had opinions less about _what _kind of house and more about _where_.

He knew where the Grangers lived, of course. He had been participatory in the process of rescuing them from Australia, and although he didn't remember their _address,_ it was a matter of a few minutes' work to Apparate there in the middle of the night and read the street signs and the numbers on the door. Sirius ended up telling the real estate agent that he wanted to live 'somewhere in this area', pointing vaguely at a point somewhat nearby. Harry and Sirius soon found that they had badly underestimated how long this would take.

They had, unfortunately, had to decide that they shouldn't try to do anything complicated or attention-drawing until they were safely ensconced in something better-protected than a Muggle hotel room flooded with magic-damping charms. Certainly nothing like stealing Horcruxes from their variably well-defended hiding places. Harry was not at all sanguine about his ability to maintain damping charms while doing anything _difficult_, and Sirius was more than slightly concerned that the Aurors, even without convenient wand-specified tracking spells, had the detector power to catch them if they weren't surrounded by other wizards. So the Aurors might, Harry had concluded concernedly, be able to find them if they did anything magically loud.

"_Building wards_ is magically loud," pointed out Sirius, after a second's alarmed pause.

"Oh," said Harry. "Shit." Then, after he'd thought about it for a moment, he said, "Okay, what if I hold _temporary_ shields while _you_ build wards? You saw, I can block out the Aurors fine if I stand still."

Sirius considered that, and then nodded. "Yeah, that could work."

It'd been nearly a month since they'd broken Sirius out of Azkaban, when their Muggle realtor offered to show them a house that Harry was almost positive was literally right across the street from the Doctors Granger. This was such an amazingly convenient coincidence that they spent a further week checking the building top to bottom for traps and signs of magic. This was a strange enough behavior even if they kept their wands out of sight that the realtor seemed to think they might be actually crazy, but he still knew real money when he saw it. So, once Harry was satisfied that the building was probably not going to try to eat them, Sirius bought the property outright.

Since it would look very weird to the surrounding Muggles if the move-in didn't involve actual moving vans, Harry and Sirius carefully rented storage space and bought a bunch of furniture, and then hired an actual Muggle moving company. They had to wait for the first of August so that the previous occupants could leave, however.

The time in between was allotted entirely to defense design. They went briefly to London in different disguises, to buy a truly ridiculous number of books, among which were contained the shield building references that Sirius wanted. You could never be too careful about looking suspicious, after all; so they made it look more like "it is a Ravenclaw's birthday" and less like "we are buying all of the required information with which to construct a way to hide from Aurors." Although, as Sirius pointed out rather amusedly when they'd gotten home, _most _people probably wouldn't be able to shut out the Aurors for any length of time _even with_ this much information. "We," he said, "are cheating outrageously."_  
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"Always the best possible approach," said Harry brightly.

By the end of July they had something, built from what Sirius had designed while they were waiting for their owl to return. Rex was now under persistent Disillusionment, so that the Muggles in the hotel they were staying in wouldn't notice him being _extremely conspicuously magic,_ and they had a ward system drawn out that Harry was moderately certain even Dumbledore might have had trouble penetrating. Although, really, he was going to try _very hard _to make sure that the Headmaster of Hogwarts had no reason to try. They didn't need that in their lives.

So it was that on the first of August, 1986, "Michael Murphy" and his son "Adrian" moved into a house across the street from the Doctors Granger and their daughter Hermione.

Nervous about standing around in the unshielded street, Harry disguised his wand as a large red feather so that he could keep it in hand, wave it at people (doing silent checks for magic, especially disguises), and look like a Muggle kid with a toy or comfort object, even to wizarding observers. He didn't _think_ there were any wizards living near here, but you could never be _sure _without checking, and the kind of wide-angle detection spells that would tell him that were magically-loud enough that he didn't feel at all safe doing it until they had real wards.

Sirius had his wand up the sleeve of his leather jacket, and he was still a little twitchy. He was directing the movement of furniture and intermittently glancing at Harry for confirmation that nothing strange was going on, while Harry wandered around slightly underfoot and took advantage of no one looking too closely at small children.

No one, of course, except the extremely observant Grangers.

Harry was looking very intently at a passing car, which was driving by unusually slowly, when a little girl with a great cloud of brown hair and a little pocket notebook asked him curiously, "Why d'you have a big red feather?" He yelped and jumped, startled by the sudden voice. It was familiar, and at the same time very strange. He stared wordlessly at tiny six-year-old Hermione Granger for a long and awkward moment, finding that he had completely forgotten the excuse that he'd invented in advance.

"Um," he said. And then, because her eyebrows were rising, he offered, " ... I like feathers?"

Hermione said, "Okay," and shrugged. Hermione was six; she was curious, but not yet paranoid. "Are you going to be our new neighbors?" she asked, after another awkward silence.

"Yeah," said Harry. "Yeah, I'm Adrian, that's my dad," and he pointed at Sirius.

"Hermione Granger, pleased to meet you," said Hermione almost automatically, holding out her hand politely. It was her left, because she was still holding her notebook.

Harry cheerfully shook hands left-handed. "Same to you! Do you go to school?"

Hermione gave him a look like _that was a weird question_. Harry supposed it probably was; he should have said _where do you go to school_ or _what year are you in_, but he wasn't thinking very clearly today and he'd forgotten how old Muggle children usually were when they started school. Nevertheless, Hermione said, "Of course I go to school, I started last year. Don't you?"

"No," said Harry, "um, I just learn stuff from my dad."

"Huh," said Hermione. "Doesn't he go to work?"

Well, that was an obvious flaw in the plan, wasn't it. They couldn't say Sirius had a Perfectly Normal Muggle Job _and then also _say Harry was homeschooled, not when his imaginary mother was even more dead than his real one.

"Um," said Harry. He supposed they'd just have to admit that Sirius was independently wealthy for inheritance reasons. That wasn't actually _unheard of _or anything, and it was technically true. "No?"

Hermione frowned at him. "That's weird," she opined. "My mum and dad both do, that's why I have to go to school."

Well, that was a convenient way to change the subject to: "What do your parents do?"

"Oh, they're dentists," said Hermione with the cheerful tone of the only child who has never had an unpleasant experience with one. "They fix people's teeth!"

"Cool," said Harry.

There was another awkward silence.

Harry was beginning to understand why they'd needed Ron even before he learned to fight.

"Um," said Hermione, glancing back at her house in a way that told Harry she'd been _told _to make friends and kind of wished she didn't have to. She fidgeted with her little notebook and asked, "Do you like to read?"

"Occasionally, I guess?" said Harry, wincing. Hermione didn't know about magic, he couldn't say _I'd rather play Quidditch_. And besides Hermione didn't like Quidditch, and it had just occurred to him that he was going to have trouble actually _making friends _with Hermione. Because they didn't actually have much in common, before there had been magic and a war to fight. His entire mental model of Hermione was tied up in her fascination with magic and the ways the magical world worked. It had just occurred to him to wonder: If she hadn't been a witch, what would she have _done _with her life? What would you expect a six-year-old version of her to _expect from_ her life? Did she want to be a doctor? A lawyer? An animal-rights activist? What did she _do _with her time that wasn't related to magic?

... Hermione was or would be an otter Animagus. She must like to swim, right? Harry wasn't opposed to the sport in concept, although he'd honestly never really tried it. Feathers and water don't often mix in terribly friendly ways.

Still, he wanted to be friends. It was important. "I like to swim?" he offered. Maybe he would, if he tried it.

To his deep and intense relief, Hermione lit up like a torch. "I like swimming!" she enthused. "There's an indoor pool at the gym a few blocks from here, I bet my mum would take you with us next time we go, she'd be really pleased, would you?"

"Okay," said Harry, smiling. "Yeah."

The next few weeks of his life were taken up by violently remodeling the entire house they'd just bought. They made sure to visibly take trips to the hardware store and to actually paint the outside bits by hand, but mostly it was done with magic, taking apart the walls and sinking defensive magic into the very bones of the house. They carved defensive runes into every inch of the building and then filled them in with spackle and fresh paint. They reinforced the windows and doors to make it equally difficult to break in using brute physical force. They covered everything with the magical equivalent of soundproofing, making sure that no noticeable signals of magic would escape the building. Since they needed to interact with Muggles there were no Muggle-repelling charms, only spells that would make everything _look_ perfectly normal, so that the cutlery wouldn't move and the radio would go silent and the books would pretend not to be about magic and Rex would not catch fire, if anyone other than Sirius and Harry was in the house.

They had considered various forms of "if you are magic / not magic" type charms, and rejected all of them. If they wanted to interact with Hermione and not break the Statute early for her, things in their house could not react differently to her versus to her parents. And building in an exception was insufficient; it was theoretically possible, although not likely, that they had other magical neighbors. And they did _not _want anyone in the magical community noticing them. They did set up the system so that other people could be conveniently added to its permissions, though, for later use. And the house would _default _to not letting people in, in a way that looked like "the locks are unusually difficult to pick" or "the windows are unusually hard to break" or whatever; either Harry or Sirius had to actually open the door for someone, deliberately. Harry, thinking of his Cloak, had made sure they built in required-intent so that someone couldn't sneak invisibly by when they walked through the front door.

And, of course, they made all of their interior design decisions based on Lily's remembered opinions (warm golds and greens, and lots of bookshelves), because why not?

Sirius managed not to be completely terrifying, thankfully, when Mr. Dr. Granger ambled over to say hello with a plate of homemade cookies and a business card. He introduced himself politely, made tea, and conveyed most of his carefully invented cover story. Wealthy and technologically-averse parents who had died in a car accident and left him enough money to live without working, that's why he doesn't own a car and will probably get a motorcycle; wife who'd been an interior designer and then died of cancer, note how his house is much prettier than it would be if he hadn't had her plans; dead wife had strong feelings about public education so he's homeschooling his son. He said thank you for the cookies, and was friendly, and politely deflected John Granger's rather observant inquiry as to whether he'd been in the military, because he had 'that sort of look' to him.

Meanwhile, Harry went to the community pool with Hermione and Mrs. Dr. Granger, and had a surprising amount of fun.

Swimming, it turned out, was much more pleasant when you were not in imminent danger of being drowned by grindylows.


	9. You Have Forgotten Something

It became a sort of weekly habit for Harry and Hermione, accompanied by whichever of Hermione's parents was free, to traipse down the street to the community pool and go swimming. Their conversations tended to be rather one-sided, Harry just nodding agreeably as Hermione chattered on about her schoolwork and her favorite books and so on, but Harry, although these things were mostly meaningless to him, honestly didn't mind. He was long used to listening to Hermione enthuse about things he didn't personally have much interest in, and even if Hermione's voice was much higher-pitched than he was used to, it had a familiar cadence to it. Surrounded by unfamiliar things (a new house, a new street, new neighbors, a new wand) and unfamiliar feelings (he was too short, too slow, too weak, too _young_), the presence of one bit of normalcy was extremely soothing.

In late September, they'd gone to visit the Delacours for an afternoon. Fleur had been utterly delighted to see her "cousin Adrian", and she'd gleefully dragged him around the house showing off her gardens. They had a Quidditch pitch on the grounds of their ridiculously beautiful estate, surrounded by foliage that protected them from Muggle view if they stayed relatively low to the ground. Apparently Apolline loved to garden and had instilled the love of foliage in her daughter, but Fleur admitted cheerfully that she'd gotten slightly distracted from the practice when she discovered broomsticks. "Flowers," she said sagely, "do not fly." She glanced at the neatly stacked broomsticks by the shiny golden (shortened) goal hoops, and then said, "Wanna race?"

As much as common sense told Harry that it would _not _be a good idea to demonstrate how he was way better at flying than any five-year-old had any right to be, he hadn't been on a broomstick for months. "Yes," he said, before his brain had had a chance to object. "Yes, let's."

It turned out he hadn't had to worry about it. Although Fleur's mother had clearly had the foresight to put a number of safety charms on the broomsticks she let her daughter use freely, it was surprisingly difficult to control a broom when you were so tiny. Harry found he couldn't get more than ten feet off the ground, since the brooms had been charmed not to do that, and that they'd respond to simple voice commands in addition to normal controls, but all the same he had a lot of trouble. It was hard, for instance, to corner properly when he was so much smaller than the broom, especially since he'd never actually tried to fly before he was eleven, and nine-year-old Fleur outflew him quite fairly.

They went inside again and had tiny cute sandwiches and grape juice, and then bid goodbye and headed back to England. Harry found to his great amusement that Sirius had spent most of the afternoon politely having tea with Franz Delacour and talking about healing charms. Sirius was very proud of himself for managing to have this conversation, inclusive of discussing how best to treat bleeding wounds that had been cursed, without admitting to having been part of the Order of the Phoenix, which officially did not exist. "I am very proud of you," agreed Harry. "Also, really, Dumbledore actually managed to make people think the Order isn't real? Are you kidding me? It was so obviously a thing!"

"There were never very many of us," pointed out Sirius. "And there was always enough overlap with the Auror Corps that anything we did could be easily attributed to the DMLE. It wasn't like Chief Bones was going to interrogate her brother that closely about what he did with his spare time, not when we were making her life so much easier."

"Okay, fair point," admitted Harry. Then they resumed work on their exhaustive, paranoid defenses.

When they were finally completely confident in the ability of their wards to resist any assault or suspicion or notice, which was halfway through December, they moved on to the next stage of their rewritten, very cautious plan.

First, Sirius gave the goblins a truly ridiculous bribe in exchange for transferring a huge fraction of the contents of the Black Family Vault into a new account labelled 'Michael Murphy' and then erasing the paper trail between the two. Since his mother's relatively recent death, he'd become the owner of the accumulated wealth of the House of Black, so he _had _plenty of money, it was just a question of having convenient access to it without the Aurors noticing. The only way to do that was to get the goblins to cooperate with making the records appear as if Sirius Black was drawing money and disappearing with it (as you might expect from a man on the run from the law), and Michael Murphy had been paid consistently, for years, for working as a cursebreaker and had nothing whatsoever to do with Sirius Black. Fortunately, it was 1986 and the goblins of Gringotts had no reason to have a grudge against Harry Potter or anyone associated with him, so they were willing to do this if their palms were greased sufficiently well, and there was no shortage of gold for this purpose. (Harry didn't try to draw from the Potter vault. _His _family didn't use blood keys and he would need the actual, physical key, which Dumbledore currently had. Fortunately, he didn't need to.)

Second, Michael Murphy got a subscription to the _Daily Prophet_. They needed to know what was going on in the wizarding world, even if they were going to avoid interacting with it as much as possible. They got a number of back articles from a secondhand bookstore, as well. From this they learned that Sirius Black's escape and Harry Potter's disappearance were no longer quite _front-page _news, but they were still mentioned, as the subject of much speculation and debate about what had happened and where they might have gone. It was clear that Dumbledore was being obstructive; although he was nominally cooperating with the Aurors and had apparently been forced to admit that he'd given Harry to Muggle relatives (there was a lot of yelling in the editorials about this), the Chief Warlock was for 'unknown reasons' being very cagey about what he thought might have happened to Harry. Harry read that article, sighed, and said aloud, "Yeah, he thinks I'm possessed."

"Well," said Sirius, "to be fair, I wouldn't have guessed _time travel_ in a million years, either. And he still thinks I'm a Death Eater. From that starting premise it's an easy conclusion if you see us together."

"Yeah, we'll see what he does when we get to fixing that, I guess."

Third, they went to Grimmauld Place and Silenced all the portraits, starting with Phineas Nigellus, plus Kreacher. Harry insisted very firmly that they were not to _hurt_ Kreacher, to Sirius' annoyance, but the elderly house elf was a security risk. Powerful permanent Silencing spells were the best way to fix that without killing him, although they took some time to do. They didn't need to _permanently_ silence the portraits, just keep them quiet long enough to do what they were there for without being interrupted. Once they'd done that, Harry picked up the Slytherin Locket (sitting innocuously on a display shelf), glared at it a little, and pocketed it. Then they went methodically through the house, taking everything that might be useful and destroying everything dangerous, and left. The Locket went into a pre-prepared invisible locked box in a charmed locked chest in a closet without a door in the basement of their house, where it would stay until they figured out how to effectively destroy it.

Fourth, they went to Little Hangleton, broke into the Gaunts' empty house, and found to Harry's dismay that the Gaunt Ring containing the Resurrection Stone was nowhere to be found. "Are you _sure_," said Sirius, "that it should be here?"

"Well, Dumbledore said it belonged to Tom's uncle Morfin and he ... stole it from him ... in the eighties ... " Harry trailed off, sighing. "No, you're right, I don't know why I assumed he'd have brought it _back here _to hide. That was the one Dumbledore found over the summer between my fifth and sixth years of school, he never actually told me where he'd found it."

"That," said Sirius, "is a problem."

"Thank you," said Harry dryly, "I had _no _idea."

They set the building on fire, and the Riddle Manor as well for good measure.

To Harry's great amusement, this completely failed to appear in the _Daily Prophet_.

Fifth, they designed a stack of charms that didn't actually involve disguising themselves. When they were pretending to be perfectly normal people it was important that thy were unrecognizeable; if they were going to go mess with things, that was a pointless effort. The _goal_ of course was not to be noticed at all, but once they got caught there'd be no point in trying to pretend to be someone else. So this was just a project in making several different defensive charms work together - Disillusionment, silent step charms, Notice-Me-Nots and their relatives, etc.

Sixth, on December 23rd of 1986, around midnight, they did a number of things in very quick succession. Only _most _of them were horribly illegal.

Sirius, dogform and invisible, crept into Hogwarts via the Shrieking Shack. He padded silently through the darkened halls of the mostly-empty castle, bleeding charms that said _pay no attention to me, I am not interesting, there is nothing here that is worth looking for, _covered with scent-masking charms that would prevent even Mrs. Norris from noticing his presence. According to Harry he'd been able to do this without a wand, without secrecy spells and when the castle was full of students, but you could never be too careful. He broke into Filch's office, rifled through the confiscated student property boxes, and turned into a person just long enough to pocket the Marauders' Map.

Harry, slightly less quiet but considerably smaller, stood on the edge of the Weasleys' property for awhile, examining the old, old wards. Bill Weasley was fifteen, not yet an expert on the construction and destruction of stationary protective magic; it would be some years before he would replace and improve the magic that had sat on the Burrow for generations. For now, it was old and outdated, and Harry - after a little time making sure he understood the setup - stepped through the lines with barely a whisper of a ripple in the magic. There would not be so much as a spark of an alarm, as he padded up to the front door, thought _alohomora _at the lock, and stepped inside the Burrow. He let himself have a half a moment of staring at the grandfather clock (_Ginevra - Home_), and then headed up the stairs.

Sirius did not _remember _where he was going, exactly. He had never been to the Room of Requirement and most of what he consciously knew about Hogwarts was still gone in the fog of Demented memories. But all the same, he had spent seven years learning more about what made the castle tick than most teachers ever knew. If he didn't try to think about it, didn't do anything but slide into easy habits, he found himself on the seventh floor, having crossed paths with no one, without even really trying. Then he went to where Harry had told him to go, because the Room of Requirement wasn't on his Map, and paced across the hallway on silent padded paws, and thought: _Give me the place where things are hidden_.

Harry nearly walked all the way to the attic, carefully silencing the creaky stairs as he went, and then remembered that Scabbers had not been _Ron's _pet rat until their first year of school. Then he reversed course and found the room, partway up the stairs, which belonged to Percy. It would have been stranger, looking at Percy Weasley at the age of only ten, if he hadn't been quite distracted by the sleeping rat on the desk. Harry had spent a long time coming to terms with what had happened to Peter Pettigrew, who had eventually regretted his actions, but he still couldn't quite help the spike of hatred. _So many things_, he thought darkly, _are your fault_. He hit the sleeping rat on the nose with a silent Stunning Jinx, and then padded across the room to pick him up, wrapping Wormtail in dark ropes of magic as he went. He left a note on the desk, written beforehand, for Percy: _  
><em>

_To Percy Weasley: _

_Ask me in five years why I needed your rat if you really want to know._

_You have that right, but -_

_Trust me, you probably don't want to know._

_Sorry for the inconvenience. _

_Buy yourself an owl, they're more useful anyway. _

_HJP_

(Along with this note, he left thirty-five Galleons in a little bag. That was rather more money than was necessary to buy an owl, but he knew perfectly well that Percy would give the money to his mother.)

Sirius stepped through the door to the Room of Hidden Things, and was briefly struck speechless by the sheer enormity and dormant, dusty magnificence of the place. He made a mental note not to let this place be set aflame as Harry had described happening. Partly because there was no way it wasn't full of irreplaceable historical artifacts, but mostly because it was suddenly extremely important that Moony get to see it. (Sirius had been _told _Moony's real name, which he'd forgotten in Azkaban, but he still hadn't really internalized it again. To him, Remus Lupin was mostly an accumulation of wolf-shaped, parchment-scented sensory impressions; but all the same, he knew his friend would want to see this place.) He couldn't stand in awe for too long, though; he had specific instructions and a specific goal. So the dog paced through the stacks of dusty lost things, looking for a broken Vanishing Cabinet and a fraction of a marble statue, where Harry had said he would find the Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw sitting innocuously on a table.

Harry Disapparated as soon as he was far enough from the Burrow that Silencing charms would completely muffle the sound. He landed in the atrium of Department of Magical Law Enforcement, just outside the elevator and in front of the doors that led to various offices, training rooms, holding cells, and so forth. He heard the very faint sound of someone getting up very suddenly from a chair, and knew all his defensive spells had been inadequate to the task of fooling the Eye of Vance. Accordingly, he moved quickly. The walls were white and clean; a modified inking charm was all that was required to draw clear, bold letters in black paint.

_Peter Pettigrew is an unregistered rat Animagus._

_Peter Pettigrew killed twelve unarmed Muggles with a Blasting Curse and pinned it on Sirius Black. _

_(He was also Lily and James Potter's Secret-Keeper and a Death Eater spy, but those things technically are not illegal._)

_IF YOU LET HIM GET AWAY,_

_I WILL KILL HIM, AND THEN YOU._

That note, Harry didn't sign with his name or anything else. He just pulled the wooden leg off of a chair, shrank it to rat-size with a Transfiguration charm that would stop working the moment anyone did an Animagus transformation within five feet of it, and nailed still-unconscious Wormtail to the wall through the ribcage. (He'd be fine. Wizards could take a lot of punishment, and unlike vampires had no unusual relationship with wooden stakes. He probably wasn't going to enjoy waking up, though.) He caught just a glimpse of Alastor Moody running the door, and could not resist waving cheerily; and then he was gone, leaving the sound of yelling behind him.

Sirius turned into himself. He pushed stray books aside, carefully, and wondered why Harry had said there'd be a Vanishing Cabinet here. Something about Draco Malfoy, he thought, but maybe that hadn't happened yet. There was only the marble bust of a woman who might or might not be Rowena Ravenclaw, and dust and books and broken things ... and there it was, an artifact lost to the ages. Sirius picked up the Diadem of Ravenclaw, and stared at it. Something about it was magnetic, powerfully fascinating. It was delicate and light, woven of platinum sprinkled with tiny sapphires. He had never seen such a beautiful artifact in all his life.

"I," he said aloud, "am forgetting something," and then he put it on.


End file.
